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Will Johnson ever be able to shake off partygate? – politicalbetting.com

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    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,249
    DougSeal said:

    DougSeal said:

    DougSeal said:

    boulay said:

    DougSeal said:

    kle4 said:

    DougSeal said:

    ohnotnow said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    Convinced my wife a few months ago to watch DS9, she's not hugely into sci-fi but I sold it as a character drama more than anything else. She's really enjoying it, we got to Far Beyond the Stars (captain Sisko transports back to 1950s segregated America in a vision) this morning after putting Jen down for her nap. She was actually amazed at how good it is and how relevant it is today.

    What I think has impressed her most over the whole run is how well having a black captain was done. The reason she agreed was because she watched Discovery originally and found it merely ok so I suggested we go back to peak ST which for me is DS9. Coming back to this morning's episode she thinks if it was released today it would get lauded as one of the best TV episodes made. Have to say I agree, it really is brilliant.

    DS9 is amazing.

    Also enjoying the new Picard. Why it took them until Season 3 to deliver what everyone wanted I don't know.
    Haven't started Picard season 3, the first two were so awful so I'm waiting until it's all out to watch it.

    On the latter it's because modern TV writers have planet sized egos. They can't admit they got it wrong, season 3 has got a new writing team after Paramount sacked the original team after season 2 flopped. The Witcher suffers from this issue and Amazon will need to get a new writing team for Rings of Power as well. The Witcher writers managed to push Henry Cavill out and with him I think the audience goes too so Netflix will have to choose after season 4 flops whether to cancel it or sack the writers and bring back Henry Cavill with a team that will actually respect the source material. Same as Rings of Power.

    If you look at the most successful recent shows they are House of the Dragon and The Last of Us, both of them respect the brilliant source material and bring it all to life. In games Hogwarts Legacy has been a huge success and that's because it is a love letter to the Harry Potter universe and really respects everything JK Rowling wrote.
    I didn't even make it to the end of S1 of Picard. Though I did enjoy the 'Strange New Worlds'. Closest thing to 'real Star Trek' they've put out in a long while.
    It is worrying that there’s so much time and effort put into keeping very old franchises alive rather than trying to create new ones.
    Eh, a bit. Even more than normal nostalgia reboots and revivals are very high right now. But there's nothing wrong in itself in redoing older stuff. Thats how they become part of our culture.

    Why keep keeping Shakespeare alive?
    Fair point. But they’re not writing new Shakespeare. “Macbeth 2: The Quickening” anyone?
    Hamlet 2: Still Can't Decide.
    King Lear: The Next Generation
    A Spring’s Tale.
    Richard the Fourth
    Henry IV, Part 2.
    Much ado about Something
    Thirteenth Night.
    Shakespeare did write Love’s Labour’s Won and Cordelia although we don’t have the manuscripts as they were never published even in the Folio.
  • Options
    MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,607

    I think in hindsight we should have locked the over 60s and very vulnerable indoors but everyone else should have been free. I naively assumed we’d get some kind of gratitude or sympathy for what we did but no we just get fucked over again and again. Sick of it.

    I think you let your anger colour a rational appreciation of reality. Many, many people under 60 died, and many more would have if we had simply locked up the over 60s. Besides, you’d never pass such a law. What next? Only under 30s to wear tight jeans?
    At the time you were one of the most strident in calling for lockdowns. Endless posts of ‘lockdown now’. It was never just about protecting the elderly. Prior to vaccination covid could take people of any age, albeit skewed to the older population, just like flu. The lockdowns were to prevent stress on the healthcare system so that deaths from other causes didn’t happen. You think the ambulance waits were bad recently? Wonder what would have happened if we had not locked down in March 2020.

    There is one awful counterfactual out there. A do nothing approach, have a huge wave, infect most and then recover. No idea how many would have died but plausibly over a million when secondary death is included due to the lack of healthcare. But we would have been through it quicker. It’s just that few societies would accept that risk.
    I think the anti-lockdown crowd also forget that the vast majority of people were already locking themselves down in advance of the official rules. Shops were closing, pubs and cafes were empty. This matters because the economy was grinding to a halt but without it being official the systems to provide support to our economy, to all the businesses that were going to go bust, would have been a lot more difficult if not impossible.

    So the end result would have been more people dying but less support for people to survive. Far more people would have been forced to put themselves in danger for purely economic reasons and the country would have come out of it in a far worse place.
    That's people's personal choice at that point which is what should have been after lockdown 1. You're supposed to be a liberal.
  • Options
    Sean_FSean_F Posts: 35,850

    Mr. Royale, sometimes, that's true. The thing is, competence affects this too.

    A smarter writing group could've had a checklist of skin colours in Rings of Power by setting it in Harad. But because they're ignorant they have tokenistic efforts. Let's say, for argument's sake, there are black dwarves. You don't get just one. That's not how genetics work. So you need either more present on screen, or emphasise that the marriage was political initially (uniting a white dwarf clan and black dwarf clan in alliance) but they've grown to love one another. It just needs a sentence. But having Disa as a solo black dwarf makes it seem like she was thrust from the heavens into Middle-Earth. And having small communities with wildly varying skin tones in a fantastical but roughly medieval setting betrays an incredible level of demographic and historical ignorance. A more cosmopolitian approach in a huge city can work better to a degree (although you still end up with distinct districts) but in a village?

    It's akin to comically 'sensitive' idiots who were upset that Kingdom Come: Deliverance (set in a few square miles of Bohemia in 1403) had only white people in it.

    Numenor could realistically be more diverse. It’s a great imperial power, and one would expect merchants, sailors, students, members of the local elites in its colonies to make their way there, like London or Paris in 1900.
  • Options
    noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 20,761

    On a serious point I presume it is okay for Russians to come on this site and give us their opinions? Is it just bot farms that are blacklisted?

    I think one of the problems for Russian political gamblers is if they back Putin they get closed down for being shrewdies and if they back anyone else they get sent to Siberia!
  • Options
    boulayboulay Posts: 3,934
    DougSeal said:

    DougSeal said:

    DougSeal said:

    boulay said:

    DougSeal said:

    kle4 said:

    DougSeal said:

    ohnotnow said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    Convinced my wife a few months ago to watch DS9, she's not hugely into sci-fi but I sold it as a character drama more than anything else. She's really enjoying it, we got to Far Beyond the Stars (captain Sisko transports back to 1950s segregated America in a vision) this morning after putting Jen down for her nap. She was actually amazed at how good it is and how relevant it is today.

    What I think has impressed her most over the whole run is how well having a black captain was done. The reason she agreed was because she watched Discovery originally and found it merely ok so I suggested we go back to peak ST which for me is DS9. Coming back to this morning's episode she thinks if it was released today it would get lauded as one of the best TV episodes made. Have to say I agree, it really is brilliant.

    DS9 is amazing.

    Also enjoying the new Picard. Why it took them until Season 3 to deliver what everyone wanted I don't know.
    Haven't started Picard season 3, the first two were so awful so I'm waiting until it's all out to watch it.

    On the latter it's because modern TV writers have planet sized egos. They can't admit they got it wrong, season 3 has got a new writing team after Paramount sacked the original team after season 2 flopped. The Witcher suffers from this issue and Amazon will need to get a new writing team for Rings of Power as well. The Witcher writers managed to push Henry Cavill out and with him I think the audience goes too so Netflix will have to choose after season 4 flops whether to cancel it or sack the writers and bring back Henry Cavill with a team that will actually respect the source material. Same as Rings of Power.

    If you look at the most successful recent shows they are House of the Dragon and The Last of Us, both of them respect the brilliant source material and bring it all to life. In games Hogwarts Legacy has been a huge success and that's because it is a love letter to the Harry Potter universe and really respects everything JK Rowling wrote.
    I didn't even make it to the end of S1 of Picard. Though I did enjoy the 'Strange New Worlds'. Closest thing to 'real Star Trek' they've put out in a long while.
    It is worrying that there’s so much time and effort put into keeping very old franchises alive rather than trying to create new ones.
    Eh, a bit. Even more than normal nostalgia reboots and revivals are very high right now. But there's nothing wrong in itself in redoing older stuff. Thats how they become part of our culture.

    Why keep keeping Shakespeare alive?
    Fair point. But they’re not writing new Shakespeare. “Macbeth 2: The Quickening” anyone?
    Hamlet 2: Still Can't Decide.
    King Lear: The Next Generation
    A Spring’s Tale.
    Richard the Fourth
    Henry IV, Part 2.
    Much ado about Something
    Thirteenth Night.
    Romeooooh and Ghouliette.
  • Options
    turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 15,201
    MaxPB said:

    I think in hindsight we should have locked the over 60s and very vulnerable indoors but everyone else should have been free. I naively assumed we’d get some kind of gratitude or sympathy for what we did but no we just get fucked over again and again. Sick of it.

    I think you let your anger colour a rational appreciation of reality. Many, many people under 60 died, and many more would have if we had simply locked up the over 60s. Besides, you’d never pass such a law. What next? Only under 30s to wear tight jeans?
    At the time you were one of the most strident in calling for lockdowns. Endless posts of ‘lockdown now’. It was never just about protecting the elderly. Prior to vaccination covid could take people of any age, albeit skewed to the older population, just like flu. The lockdowns were to prevent stress on the healthcare system so that deaths from other causes didn’t happen. You think the ambulance waits were bad recently? Wonder what would have happened if we had not locked down in March 2020.

    There is one awful counterfactual out there. A do nothing approach, have a huge wave, infect most and then recover. No idea how many would have died but plausibly over a million when secondary death is included due to the lack of healthcare. But we would have been through it quicker. It’s just that few societies would accept that risk.
    I think the anti-lockdown crowd also forget that the vast majority of people were already locking themselves down in advance of the official rules. Shops were closing, pubs and cafes were empty. This matters because the economy was grinding to a halt but without it being official the systems to provide support to our economy, to all the businesses that were going to go bust, would have been a lot more difficult if not impossible.

    So the end result would have been more people dying but less support for people to survive. Far more people would have been forced to put themselves in danger for purely economic reasons and the country would have come out of it in a far worse place.
    That's people's personal choice at that point which is what should have been after lockdown 1. You're supposed to be a liberal.
    What was going to stop the exponential rise of covid after lockdown 1 but before vaccination? Only people getting covid. I actually think the tiers, derided by many, were working to an extent, right up until the Kent variant hit, and all hell broke out. Without vaccination you are all immunologically naive.
  • Options
    Richard_TyndallRichard_Tyndall Posts: 30,951

    Mr. Tyndall, my understanding was that harfoots are just one of the three groups of hobbits. They're not a separate thing or forerunner race/species. Using them that way, I believe, was just an invention of the writers because they thought an audience needed nods to the films/books (hence Not-Legolas being in, and Gandalf).

    They are one of three races that combine to become the Hobbits (not sure about Tolkien's grasp of genetics there)
  • Options
    LeonLeon Posts: 47,237

    boulay said:

    Mr. Max, DS9 has a lot to like. Damar's arc springs to mind, and the conversation Kira has with him about whether or not to bomb facilities after the Dominion choose to make sure every one has Cardassians present is interesting for the moral quandry it raises.

    Mr. Seal, I hardly ever watch new stuff (although I did get a box set of the first three seasons of The Expanse and liked it a lot. May watch House of the Dragon at some point). A problem can be when something seeks to claim the fanbase of an IP then changes it utterly for a 'modern audience' (Velma could be such an example).

    And sometimes writing quality is just atrocious. Yes, Galadriel taking a pyroclastic flow to the face and being just fine. I'm looking at you.

    The trouble is writers can't resist the Wokery.

    And, when they do, people just turn off.
    I stumbled across a series called “the boys” (I usually don’t like superhero things) and have never watched anything so non-correct. Attacks certain political positions but not from a pearl clutching standpoint and with dark humour.

    The best thing is that I have never heard the banned “C” word used so much outside of mumsnet.
    The Boys is fantastic. Karl Urban proving once again what a great actor he is. Also worth watching Preacher which was also written by Garth Ennis. Made by the same team and has the same black humour.

    Unless you are religious. If you are religious you probably won't enjoy it.
    The Boys is excellent. I am running out of tv drama to watch in the Kok but that’s kept me going

    Barbarians Season Two is, by contrast, beyond poor. It’s like a Parody of Wokeness but written by Woke people. In the 14th minute of season 2 episode 1 there’s a handy Carthaginian princess to be black and female and powerful and in minute 36 it turns out the brutal Roman general is actually having a tragic gay affair with the Teutonic chieftain

    Then I gave up
  • Options
    DougSeal said:

    boulay said:

    DougSeal said:

    kle4 said:

    DougSeal said:

    ohnotnow said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    Convinced my wife a few months ago to watch DS9, she's not hugely into sci-fi but I sold it as a character drama more than anything else. She's really enjoying it, we got to Far Beyond the Stars (captain Sisko transports back to 1950s segregated America in a vision) this morning after putting Jen down for her nap. She was actually amazed at how good it is and how relevant it is today.

    What I think has impressed her most over the whole run is how well having a black captain was done. The reason she agreed was because she watched Discovery originally and found it merely ok so I suggested we go back to peak ST which for me is DS9. Coming back to this morning's episode she thinks if it was released today it would get lauded as one of the best TV episodes made. Have to say I agree, it really is brilliant.

    DS9 is amazing.

    Also enjoying the new Picard. Why it took them until Season 3 to deliver what everyone wanted I don't know.
    Haven't started Picard season 3, the first two were so awful so I'm waiting until it's all out to watch it.

    On the latter it's because modern TV writers have planet sized egos. They can't admit they got it wrong, season 3 has got a new writing team after Paramount sacked the original team after season 2 flopped. The Witcher suffers from this issue and Amazon will need to get a new writing team for Rings of Power as well. The Witcher writers managed to push Henry Cavill out and with him I think the audience goes too so Netflix will have to choose after season 4 flops whether to cancel it or sack the writers and bring back Henry Cavill with a team that will actually respect the source material. Same as Rings of Power.

    If you look at the most successful recent shows they are House of the Dragon and The Last of Us, both of them respect the brilliant source material and bring it all to life. In games Hogwarts Legacy has been a huge success and that's because it is a love letter to the Harry Potter universe and really respects everything JK Rowling wrote.
    I didn't even make it to the end of S1 of Picard. Though I did enjoy the 'Strange New Worlds'. Closest thing to 'real Star Trek' they've put out in a long while.
    It is worrying that there’s so much time and effort put into keeping very old franchises alive rather than trying to create new ones.
    Eh, a bit. Even more than normal nostalgia reboots and revivals are very high right now. But there's nothing wrong in itself in redoing older stuff. Thats how they become part of our culture.

    Why keep keeping Shakespeare alive?
    Fair point. But they’re not writing new Shakespeare. “Macbeth 2: The Quickening” anyone?
    Hamlet 2: Still Can't Decide.
    King Lear: The Next Generation
    A Spring’s Tale.
    Richard the Fourth
    That's been done - in Blackadder series 1. Richard IV, played by Brian Blessed, is the "Prince in the Tower" who survived.
  • Options
    MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,607

    MaxPB said:

    I think in hindsight we should have locked the over 60s and very vulnerable indoors but everyone else should have been free. I naively assumed we’d get some kind of gratitude or sympathy for what we did but no we just get fucked over again and again. Sick of it.

    I think you let your anger colour a rational appreciation of reality. Many, many people under 60 died, and many more would have if we had simply locked up the over 60s. Besides, you’d never pass such a law. What next? Only under 30s to wear tight jeans?
    At the time you were one of the most strident in calling for lockdowns. Endless posts of ‘lockdown now’. It was never just about protecting the elderly. Prior to vaccination covid could take people of any age, albeit skewed to the older population, just like flu. The lockdowns were to prevent stress on the healthcare system so that deaths from other causes didn’t happen. You think the ambulance waits were bad recently? Wonder what would have happened if we had not locked down in March 2020.

    There is one awful counterfactual out there. A do nothing approach, have a huge wave, infect most and then recover. No idea how many would have died but plausibly over a million when secondary death is included due to the lack of healthcare. But we would have been through it quicker. It’s just that few societies would accept that risk.
    I think the anti-lockdown crowd also forget that the vast majority of people were already locking themselves down in advance of the official rules. Shops were closing, pubs and cafes were empty. This matters because the economy was grinding to a halt but without it being official the systems to provide support to our economy, to all the businesses that were going to go bust, would have been a lot more difficult if not impossible.

    So the end result would have been more people dying but less support for people to survive. Far more people would have been forced to put themselves in danger for purely economic reasons and the country would have come out of it in a far worse place.
    That's people's personal choice at that point which is what should have been after lockdown 1. You're supposed to be a liberal.
    What was going to stop the exponential rise of covid after lockdown 1 but before vaccination? Only people getting covid. I actually think the tiers, derided by many, were working to an extent, right up until the Kent variant hit, and all hell broke out. Without vaccination you are all immunologically naive.
    Nothing, that's the point. We've spent £400bn and put two generations into a position where they will have a huge life quality degradation and high taxes for life essentially so that a few hundred thousand 80+ year olds lived for another 12-18 months. It was a bad trade. If lockdown was subject to a QALY assessment it would never have been approved.
  • Options
    Richard_TyndallRichard_Tyndall Posts: 30,951
    MaxPB said:

    I think in hindsight we should have locked the over 60s and very vulnerable indoors but everyone else should have been free. I naively assumed we’d get some kind of gratitude or sympathy for what we did but no we just get fucked over again and again. Sick of it.

    I think you let your anger colour a rational appreciation of reality. Many, many people under 60 died, and many more would have if we had simply locked up the over 60s. Besides, you’d never pass such a law. What next? Only under 30s to wear tight jeans?
    At the time you were one of the most strident in calling for lockdowns. Endless posts of ‘lockdown now’. It was never just about protecting the elderly. Prior to vaccination covid could take people of any age, albeit skewed to the older population, just like flu. The lockdowns were to prevent stress on the healthcare system so that deaths from other causes didn’t happen. You think the ambulance waits were bad recently? Wonder what would have happened if we had not locked down in March 2020.

    There is one awful counterfactual out there. A do nothing approach, have a huge wave, infect most and then recover. No idea how many would have died but plausibly over a million when secondary death is included due to the lack of healthcare. But we would have been through it quicker. It’s just that few societies would accept that risk.
    I think the anti-lockdown crowd also forget that the vast majority of people were already locking themselves down in advance of the official rules. Shops were closing, pubs and cafes were empty. This matters because the economy was grinding to a halt but without it being official the systems to provide support to our economy, to all the businesses that were going to go bust, would have been a lot more difficult if not impossible.

    So the end result would have been more people dying but less support for people to survive. Far more people would have been forced to put themselves in danger for purely economic reasons and the country would have come out of it in a far worse place.
    That's people's personal choice at that point which is what should have been after lockdown 1. You're supposed to be a liberal.
    I am a liberal not an anarchist. What you propose would have resulted in anarchy. Far more economic damage to the country and far more deaths.

    Saying people have a choice when that choice is to catch covid or lose their jobs is really not very liberal at all.
  • Options
    rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 54,001
    Stocky said:

    I think in hindsight we should have locked the over 60s and very vulnerable indoors but everyone else should have been free. I naively assumed we’d get some kind of gratitude or sympathy for what we did but no we just get fucked over again and again. Sick of it.

    The Great Barrington Declaration, in other words.

    https://unherd.com/2022/01/has-the-great-barrington-declaration-been-vindicated/
    There were a lot of mistakes with the UK lockdown: it was significantly harsher than it needed to be, lasted too long, and had no meaningful risk segmentation.

    The consequence of these mistakes was that - although the UK sourced vaccines earlier than our continental neighbours - we didn't reap any benefits as far as greater freedom, earlier release, or even less economic damage.

    I was lucky enough to spend the pandemic in California, where - sure - the weather helped. But it was not just that: there were never any restrictions on meeting up outside, nor indeed would you ever have been prevented from visiting a friend's house. California's significantly less onerous restrictions crushed R every bit as effectively as the UK's, with far less impact on personal freedoms.

    Or Denmark, where they went the high tech route, with everyone having testing passes on their phone, and the frequency with which needed to test depending on the extent to which you interacted with vulnerable groups. This enabled them to keep their economy much more open than we did (they had negligible economic impact), while also seeing almost no excess deaths.
  • Options
    MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,607

    MaxPB said:

    I think in hindsight we should have locked the over 60s and very vulnerable indoors but everyone else should have been free. I naively assumed we’d get some kind of gratitude or sympathy for what we did but no we just get fucked over again and again. Sick of it.

    I think you let your anger colour a rational appreciation of reality. Many, many people under 60 died, and many more would have if we had simply locked up the over 60s. Besides, you’d never pass such a law. What next? Only under 30s to wear tight jeans?
    At the time you were one of the most strident in calling for lockdowns. Endless posts of ‘lockdown now’. It was never just about protecting the elderly. Prior to vaccination covid could take people of any age, albeit skewed to the older population, just like flu. The lockdowns were to prevent stress on the healthcare system so that deaths from other causes didn’t happen. You think the ambulance waits were bad recently? Wonder what would have happened if we had not locked down in March 2020.

    There is one awful counterfactual out there. A do nothing approach, have a huge wave, infect most and then recover. No idea how many would have died but plausibly over a million when secondary death is included due to the lack of healthcare. But we would have been through it quicker. It’s just that few societies would accept that risk.
    I think the anti-lockdown crowd also forget that the vast majority of people were already locking themselves down in advance of the official rules. Shops were closing, pubs and cafes were empty. This matters because the economy was grinding to a halt but without it being official the systems to provide support to our economy, to all the businesses that were going to go bust, would have been a lot more difficult if not impossible.

    So the end result would have been more people dying but less support for people to survive. Far more people would have been forced to put themselves in danger for purely economic reasons and the country would have come out of it in a far worse place.
    That's people's personal choice at that point which is what should have been after lockdown 1. You're supposed to be a liberal.
    I am a liberal not an anarchist. What you propose would have resulted in anarchy. Far more economic damage to the country and far more deaths.

    Saying people have a choice when that choice is to catch covid or lose their jobs is really not very liberal at all.
    No it's not anarchy, it's allowing people to make the choice that's best for them, even at the time the risk factors from COVID for working age people were very low.
  • Options
    Sean_FSean_F Posts: 35,850
    Leon said:

    boulay said:

    Mr. Max, DS9 has a lot to like. Damar's arc springs to mind, and the conversation Kira has with him about whether or not to bomb facilities after the Dominion choose to make sure every one has Cardassians present is interesting for the moral quandry it raises.

    Mr. Seal, I hardly ever watch new stuff (although I did get a box set of the first three seasons of The Expanse and liked it a lot. May watch House of the Dragon at some point). A problem can be when something seeks to claim the fanbase of an IP then changes it utterly for a 'modern audience' (Velma could be such an example).

    And sometimes writing quality is just atrocious. Yes, Galadriel taking a pyroclastic flow to the face and being just fine. I'm looking at you.

    The trouble is writers can't resist the Wokery.

    And, when they do, people just turn off.
    I stumbled across a series called “the boys” (I usually don’t like superhero things) and have never watched anything so non-correct. Attacks certain political positions but not from a pearl clutching standpoint and with dark humour.

    The best thing is that I have never heard the banned “C” word used so much outside of mumsnet.
    The Boys is fantastic. Karl Urban proving once again what a great actor he is. Also worth watching Preacher which was also written by Garth Ennis. Made by the same team and has the same black humour.

    Unless you are religious. If you are religious you probably won't enjoy it.
    The Boys is excellent. I am running out of tv drama to watch in the Kok but that’s kept me going

    Barbarians Season Two is, by contrast, beyond poor. It’s like a Parody of Wokeness but written by Woke people. In the 14th minute of season 2 episode 1 there’s a handy Carthaginian princess to be black and female and powerful and in minute 36 it turns out the brutal Roman general is actually having a tragic gay affair with the Teutonic chieftain

    Then I gave up
    I quite enjoyed Season 1, but Season 2 sounds like crap.

    Spartacus, OTOH, I thought was great at showing what life would have been like in the ancient world (other than giving gladiators superhuman fighting skills against soldiers. What actually made Spartacus so formidable is that he trained his followers to fight like soldiers).

    The sheer vileness of ancient slavery was really brought home in that series.


  • Options
    rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 54,001
    "Lockdown" is a terrible word and covers a very wide variety of sins.

    A much better way of looking at this has to be restrictions, and what impact they had on the spread of the virus, as opposed to the costs on personal freedoms.

    So restrictions on nightclubs probably made a lot of sense, as did a requirement to wear masks in rush hour on public transport.

    While preventing people from meeting others, even outside!, was a massive invasion of personal liberty with very little evidence it will have had any meaningful impact on the spread of the virus.
  • Options
    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,249
    Sean_F said:

    Mr. Royale, sometimes, that's true. The thing is, competence affects this too.

    A smarter writing group could've had a checklist of skin colours in Rings of Power by setting it in Harad. But because they're ignorant they have tokenistic efforts. Let's say, for argument's sake, there are black dwarves. You don't get just one. That's not how genetics work. So you need either more present on screen, or emphasise that the marriage was political initially (uniting a white dwarf clan and black dwarf clan in alliance) but they've grown to love one another. It just needs a sentence. But having Disa as a solo black dwarf makes it seem like she was thrust from the heavens into Middle-Earth. And having small communities with wildly varying skin tones in a fantastical but roughly medieval setting betrays an incredible level of demographic and historical ignorance. A more cosmopolitian approach in a huge city can work better to a degree (although you still end up with distinct districts) but in a village?

    It's akin to comically 'sensitive' idiots who were upset that Kingdom Come: Deliverance (set in a few square miles of Bohemia in 1403) had only white people in it.

    Numenor could realistically be more diverse. It’s a great imperial power, and one would expect merchants, sailors, students, members of the local elites in its colonies to make their way there, like London or Paris in 1900.
    Numenor was based on racism. Only the Edain were allowed to live there. Any others came as slaves captured on their voyages. And that was only later on under Ar-Adûnakhor - previously, the Numenoreans had lived in full isolation.
  • Options
    rcs1000 said:

    Stocky said:

    I think in hindsight we should have locked the over 60s and very vulnerable indoors but everyone else should have been free. I naively assumed we’d get some kind of gratitude or sympathy for what we did but no we just get fucked over again and again. Sick of it.

    The Great Barrington Declaration, in other words.

    https://unherd.com/2022/01/has-the-great-barrington-declaration-been-vindicated/
    There were a lot of mistakes with the UK lockdown: it was significantly harsher than it needed to be, lasted too long, and had no meaningful risk segmentation.

    The consequence of these mistakes was that - although the UK sourced vaccines earlier than our continental neighbours - we didn't reap any benefits as far as greater freedom, earlier release, or even less economic damage.

    I was lucky enough to spend the pandemic in California, where - sure - the weather helped. But it was not just that: there were never any restrictions on meeting up outside, nor indeed would you ever have been prevented from visiting a friend's house. California's significantly less onerous restrictions crushed R every bit as effectively as the UK's, with far less impact on personal freedoms.

    Or Denmark, where they went the high tech route, with everyone having testing passes on their phone, and the frequency with which needed to test depending on the extent to which you interacted with vulnerable groups. This enabled them to keep their economy much more open than we did (they had negligible economic impact), while also seeing almost no excess deaths.
    It is true that Sturgeon, Drakeford and Starmer would have has us in lockdown much longer if they could
  • Options
    Richard_TyndallRichard_Tyndall Posts: 30,951
    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    I think in hindsight we should have locked the over 60s and very vulnerable indoors but everyone else should have been free. I naively assumed we’d get some kind of gratitude or sympathy for what we did but no we just get fucked over again and again. Sick of it.

    I think you let your anger colour a rational appreciation of reality. Many, many people under 60 died, and many more would have if we had simply locked up the over 60s. Besides, you’d never pass such a law. What next? Only under 30s to wear tight jeans?
    At the time you were one of the most strident in calling for lockdowns. Endless posts of ‘lockdown now’. It was never just about protecting the elderly. Prior to vaccination covid could take people of any age, albeit skewed to the older population, just like flu. The lockdowns were to prevent stress on the healthcare system so that deaths from other causes didn’t happen. You think the ambulance waits were bad recently? Wonder what would have happened if we had not locked down in March 2020.

    There is one awful counterfactual out there. A do nothing approach, have a huge wave, infect most and then recover. No idea how many would have died but plausibly over a million when secondary death is included due to the lack of healthcare. But we would have been through it quicker. It’s just that few societies would accept that risk.
    I think the anti-lockdown crowd also forget that the vast majority of people were already locking themselves down in advance of the official rules. Shops were closing, pubs and cafes were empty. This matters because the economy was grinding to a halt but without it being official the systems to provide support to our economy, to all the businesses that were going to go bust, would have been a lot more difficult if not impossible.

    So the end result would have been more people dying but less support for people to survive. Far more people would have been forced to put themselves in danger for purely economic reasons and the country would have come out of it in a far worse place.
    That's people's personal choice at that point which is what should have been after lockdown 1. You're supposed to be a liberal.
    I am a liberal not an anarchist. What you propose would have resulted in anarchy. Far more economic damage to the country and far more deaths.

    Saying people have a choice when that choice is to catch covid or lose their jobs is really not very liberal at all.
    No it's not anarchy, it's allowing people to make the choice that's best for them, even at the time the risk factors from COVID for working age people were very low.
    It would have been anarchy when the hospitals could no longer cope and treat all those younger people with normal illnesses and injuries. Moreover it would not have helped the high street with most people boycotting pubs and restaurants and no government support in place.
  • Options
    ohnotnowohnotnow Posts: 2,938
    Leon said:

    boulay said:

    Mr. Max, DS9 has a lot to like. Damar's arc springs to mind, and the conversation Kira has with him about whether or not to bomb facilities after the Dominion choose to make sure every one has Cardassians present is interesting for the moral quandry it raises.

    Mr. Seal, I hardly ever watch new stuff (although I did get a box set of the first three seasons of The Expanse and liked it a lot. May watch House of the Dragon at some point). A problem can be when something seeks to claim the fanbase of an IP then changes it utterly for a 'modern audience' (Velma could be such an example).

    And sometimes writing quality is just atrocious. Yes, Galadriel taking a pyroclastic flow to the face and being just fine. I'm looking at you.

    The trouble is writers can't resist the Wokery.

    And, when they do, people just turn off.
    I stumbled across a series called “the boys” (I usually don’t like superhero things) and have never watched anything so non-correct. Attacks certain political positions but not from a pearl clutching standpoint and with dark humour.

    The best thing is that I have never heard the banned “C” word used so much outside of mumsnet.
    The Boys is fantastic. Karl Urban proving once again what a great actor he is. Also worth watching Preacher which was also written by Garth Ennis. Made by the same team and has the same black humour.

    Unless you are religious. If you are religious you probably won't enjoy it.
    The Boys is excellent. I am running out of tv drama to watch in the Kok but that’s kept me going

    Barbarians Season Two is, by contrast, beyond poor. It’s like a Parody of Wokeness but written by Woke people. In the 14th minute of season 2 episode 1 there’s a handy Carthaginian princess to be black and female and powerful and in minute 36 it turns out the brutal Roman general is actually having a tragic gay affair with the Teutonic chieftain

    Then I gave up
    If you could handle something a little more light-hearted - there was a French show a few years ago called 'Nude'. Near-future where the burqa-ban had been taken to it's ludicrous conclusion.
  • Options
    MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,607

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    I think in hindsight we should have locked the over 60s and very vulnerable indoors but everyone else should have been free. I naively assumed we’d get some kind of gratitude or sympathy for what we did but no we just get fucked over again and again. Sick of it.

    I think you let your anger colour a rational appreciation of reality. Many, many people under 60 died, and many more would have if we had simply locked up the over 60s. Besides, you’d never pass such a law. What next? Only under 30s to wear tight jeans?
    At the time you were one of the most strident in calling for lockdowns. Endless posts of ‘lockdown now’. It was never just about protecting the elderly. Prior to vaccination covid could take people of any age, albeit skewed to the older population, just like flu. The lockdowns were to prevent stress on the healthcare system so that deaths from other causes didn’t happen. You think the ambulance waits were bad recently? Wonder what would have happened if we had not locked down in March 2020.

    There is one awful counterfactual out there. A do nothing approach, have a huge wave, infect most and then recover. No idea how many would have died but plausibly over a million when secondary death is included due to the lack of healthcare. But we would have been through it quicker. It’s just that few societies would accept that risk.
    I think the anti-lockdown crowd also forget that the vast majority of people were already locking themselves down in advance of the official rules. Shops were closing, pubs and cafes were empty. This matters because the economy was grinding to a halt but without it being official the systems to provide support to our economy, to all the businesses that were going to go bust, would have been a lot more difficult if not impossible.

    So the end result would have been more people dying but less support for people to survive. Far more people would have been forced to put themselves in danger for purely economic reasons and the country would have come out of it in a far worse place.
    That's people's personal choice at that point which is what should have been after lockdown 1. You're supposed to be a liberal.
    I am a liberal not an anarchist. What you propose would have resulted in anarchy. Far more economic damage to the country and far more deaths.

    Saying people have a choice when that choice is to catch covid or lose their jobs is really not very liberal at all.
    No it's not anarchy, it's allowing people to make the choice that's best for them, even at the time the risk factors from COVID for working age people were very low.
    It would have been anarchy when the hospitals could no longer cope and treat all those younger people with normal illnesses and injuries. Moreover it would not have helped the high street with most people boycotting pubs and restaurants and no government support in place.
    And yet countries which let people make the choice didn't have those issues. And wrt healthcare you deprioritise COVID cases among those who have the lowest chance of survival at least with the NHS given it is resource limited. It might sound harsh but ultimately the alternative choice has proved to be a disaster. The UK is stuffed, we've got no money left, the highest tax burden in a generation and no growth prospects as young people start to realise there's nothing for them here.
  • Options
    jamesdoylejamesdoyle Posts: 646
    ydoethur said:

    DougSeal said:

    DougSeal said:

    DougSeal said:

    boulay said:

    DougSeal said:

    kle4 said:

    DougSeal said:

    ohnotnow said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    Convinced my wife a few months ago to watch DS9, she's not hugely into sci-fi but I sold it as a character drama more than anything else. She's really enjoying it, we got to Far Beyond the Stars (captain Sisko transports back to 1950s segregated America in a vision) this morning after putting Jen down for her nap. She was actually amazed at how good it is and how relevant it is today.

    What I think has impressed her most over the whole run is how well having a black captain was done. The reason she agreed was because she watched Discovery originally and found it merely ok so I suggested we go back to peak ST which for me is DS9. Coming back to this morning's episode she thinks if it was released today it would get lauded as one of the best TV episodes made. Have to say I agree, it really is brilliant.

    DS9 is amazing.

    Also enjoying the new Picard. Why it took them until Season 3 to deliver what everyone wanted I don't know.
    Haven't started Picard season 3, the first two were so awful so I'm waiting until it's all out to watch it.

    On the latter it's because modern TV writers have planet sized egos. They can't admit they got it wrong, season 3 has got a new writing team after Paramount sacked the original team after season 2 flopped. The Witcher suffers from this issue and Amazon will need to get a new writing team for Rings of Power as well. The Witcher writers managed to push Henry Cavill out and with him I think the audience goes too so Netflix will have to choose after season 4 flops whether to cancel it or sack the writers and bring back Henry Cavill with a team that will actually respect the source material. Same as Rings of Power.

    If you look at the most successful recent shows they are House of the Dragon and The Last of Us, both of them respect the brilliant source material and bring it all to life. In games Hogwarts Legacy has been a huge success and that's because it is a love letter to the Harry Potter universe and really respects everything JK Rowling wrote.
    I didn't even make it to the end of S1 of Picard. Though I did enjoy the 'Strange New Worlds'. Closest thing to 'real Star Trek' they've put out in a long while.
    It is worrying that there’s so much time and effort put into keeping very old franchises alive rather than trying to create new ones.
    Eh, a bit. Even more than normal nostalgia reboots and revivals are very high right now. But there's nothing wrong in itself in redoing older stuff. Thats how they become part of our culture.

    Why keep keeping Shakespeare alive?
    Fair point. But they’re not writing new Shakespeare. “Macbeth 2: The Quickening” anyone?
    Hamlet 2: Still Can't Decide.
    King Lear: The Next Generation
    A Spring’s Tale.
    Richard the Fourth
    Henry IV, Part 2.
    Much ado about Something
    Thirteenth Night.
    Shakespeare did write Love’s Labour’s Won and Cordelia although we don’t have the manuscripts as they were never published even in the Folio.
    Was that an autocorrect from Cardenio to Cordelia?
  • Options
    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,249

    ydoethur said:

    DougSeal said:

    DougSeal said:

    DougSeal said:

    boulay said:

    DougSeal said:

    kle4 said:

    DougSeal said:

    ohnotnow said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    Convinced my wife a few months ago to watch DS9, she's not hugely into sci-fi but I sold it as a character drama more than anything else. She's really enjoying it, we got to Far Beyond the Stars (captain Sisko transports back to 1950s segregated America in a vision) this morning after putting Jen down for her nap. She was actually amazed at how good it is and how relevant it is today.

    What I think has impressed her most over the whole run is how well having a black captain was done. The reason she agreed was because she watched Discovery originally and found it merely ok so I suggested we go back to peak ST which for me is DS9. Coming back to this morning's episode she thinks if it was released today it would get lauded as one of the best TV episodes made. Have to say I agree, it really is brilliant.

    DS9 is amazing.

    Also enjoying the new Picard. Why it took them until Season 3 to deliver what everyone wanted I don't know.
    Haven't started Picard season 3, the first two were so awful so I'm waiting until it's all out to watch it.

    On the latter it's because modern TV writers have planet sized egos. They can't admit they got it wrong, season 3 has got a new writing team after Paramount sacked the original team after season 2 flopped. The Witcher suffers from this issue and Amazon will need to get a new writing team for Rings of Power as well. The Witcher writers managed to push Henry Cavill out and with him I think the audience goes too so Netflix will have to choose after season 4 flops whether to cancel it or sack the writers and bring back Henry Cavill with a team that will actually respect the source material. Same as Rings of Power.

    If you look at the most successful recent shows they are House of the Dragon and The Last of Us, both of them respect the brilliant source material and bring it all to life. In games Hogwarts Legacy has been a huge success and that's because it is a love letter to the Harry Potter universe and really respects everything JK Rowling wrote.
    I didn't even make it to the end of S1 of Picard. Though I did enjoy the 'Strange New Worlds'. Closest thing to 'real Star Trek' they've put out in a long while.
    It is worrying that there’s so much time and effort put into keeping very old franchises alive rather than trying to create new ones.
    Eh, a bit. Even more than normal nostalgia reboots and revivals are very high right now. But there's nothing wrong in itself in redoing older stuff. Thats how they become part of our culture.

    Why keep keeping Shakespeare alive?
    Fair point. But they’re not writing new Shakespeare. “Macbeth 2: The Quickening” anyone?
    Hamlet 2: Still Can't Decide.
    King Lear: The Next Generation
    A Spring’s Tale.
    Richard the Fourth
    Henry IV, Part 2.
    Much ado about Something
    Thirteenth Night.
    Shakespeare did write Love’s Labour’s Won and Cordelia although we don’t have the manuscripts as they were never published even in the Folio.
    Was that an autocorrect from Cardenio to Cordelia?
    No, sadly it was just a brain fade.
  • Options
    Stark_DawningStark_Dawning Posts: 9,305
    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    I think in hindsight we should have locked the over 60s and very vulnerable indoors but everyone else should have been free. I naively assumed we’d get some kind of gratitude or sympathy for what we did but no we just get fucked over again and again. Sick of it.

    I think you let your anger colour a rational appreciation of reality. Many, many people under 60 died, and many more would have if we had simply locked up the over 60s. Besides, you’d never pass such a law. What next? Only under 30s to wear tight jeans?
    At the time you were one of the most strident in calling for lockdowns. Endless posts of ‘lockdown now’. It was never just about protecting the elderly. Prior to vaccination covid could take people of any age, albeit skewed to the older population, just like flu. The lockdowns were to prevent stress on the healthcare system so that deaths from other causes didn’t happen. You think the ambulance waits were bad recently? Wonder what would have happened if we had not locked down in March 2020.

    There is one awful counterfactual out there. A do nothing approach, have a huge wave, infect most and then recover. No idea how many would have died but plausibly over a million when secondary death is included due to the lack of healthcare. But we would have been through it quicker. It’s just that few societies would accept that risk.
    I think the anti-lockdown crowd also forget that the vast majority of people were already locking themselves down in advance of the official rules. Shops were closing, pubs and cafes were empty. This matters because the economy was grinding to a halt but without it being official the systems to provide support to our economy, to all the businesses that were going to go bust, would have been a lot more difficult if not impossible.

    So the end result would have been more people dying but less support for people to survive. Far more people would have been forced to put themselves in danger for purely economic reasons and the country would have come out of it in a far worse place.
    That's people's personal choice at that point which is what should have been after lockdown 1. You're supposed to be a liberal.
    I am a liberal not an anarchist. What you propose would have resulted in anarchy. Far more economic damage to the country and far more deaths.

    Saying people have a choice when that choice is to catch covid or lose their jobs is really not very liberal at all.
    No it's not anarchy, it's allowing people to make the choice that's best for them, even at the time the risk factors from COVID for working age people were very low.
    It would have been anarchy when the hospitals could no longer cope and treat all those younger people with normal illnesses and injuries. Moreover it would not have helped the high street with most people boycotting pubs and restaurants and no government support in place.
    And yet countries which let people make the choice didn't have those issues. And wrt healthcare you deprioritise COVID cases among those who have the lowest chance of survival at least with the NHS given it is resource limited. It might sound harsh but ultimately the alternative choice has proved to be a disaster. The UK is stuffed, we've got no money left, the highest tax burden in a generation and no growth prospects as young people start to realise there's nothing for them here.
    The UK is stuffed, we've got no money left, the highest tax burden in a generation and no growth prospects as young people start to realise there's nothing for them here.

    But enough about the achievements of the most recent Tory governments.
  • Options
    Spot on comments from @Casino_Royale and @Leon earlier - too many nations thinking they can demand something of us because we are too lacking in balls to tell them to fuck off.

    For me, the epitome of that pussy attitude is George Osborne - a man who is quite willing to sell out any interest as long as it benefits himself. His attitude over the Elgin Marbles is only the latest example, with probably his most egregious act being the whole Graphene issue and the Chinese. Truly a man who will quite happily get on his knees and suck anything as long as money is involved.
  • Options
    StuartinromfordStuartinromford Posts: 14,460
    MaxPB said:

    I think in hindsight we should have locked the over 60s and very vulnerable indoors but everyone else should have been free. I naively assumed we’d get some kind of gratitude or sympathy for what we did but no we just get fucked over again and again. Sick of it.

    I think you let your anger colour a rational appreciation of reality. Many, many people under 60 died, and many more would have if we had simply locked up the over 60s. Besides, you’d never pass such a law. What next? Only under 30s to wear tight jeans?
    At the time you were one of the most strident in calling for lockdowns. Endless posts of ‘lockdown now’. It was never just about protecting the elderly. Prior to vaccination covid could take people of any age, albeit skewed to the older population, just like flu. The lockdowns were to prevent stress on the healthcare system so that deaths from other causes didn’t happen. You think the ambulance waits were bad recently? Wonder what would have happened if we had not locked down in March 2020.

    There is one awful counterfactual out there. A do nothing approach, have a huge wave, infect most and then recover. No idea how many would have died but plausibly over a million when secondary death is included due to the lack of healthcare. But we would have been through it quicker. It’s just that few societies would accept that risk.
    I think the anti-lockdown crowd also forget that the vast majority of people were already locking themselves down in advance of the official rules. Shops were closing, pubs and cafes were empty. This matters because the economy was grinding to a halt but without it being official the systems to provide support to our economy, to all the businesses that were going to go bust, would have been a lot more difficult if not impossible.

    So the end result would have been more people dying but less support for people to survive. Far more people would have been forced to put themselves in danger for purely economic reasons and the country would have come out of it in a far worse place.
    That's people's personal choice at that point which is what should have been after lockdown 1. You're supposed to be a liberal.
    What's the libertarian creed- freedom stops at the other guy's nose? If you have an infectious disease you can transmit without having symptoms yourself, then personal responsibility alone doesn't cut it.

    And imagine we had done that. All that chaos, all that death. And in December, vaccines would have come on-stream, just as they did in our Universe. God have mercy on the politicians involved, because the public wouldn't.

    Lockdown sucked, I hope it's the worst thing in my life. But the way to reduce them was to avoid dithering and wishful thinking. And wishful thinking, assuming we can make stuff happen by wanting it enough, is why this government screws up again and again.
  • Options
    LeonLeon Posts: 47,237
    Sean_F said:

    Leon said:

    boulay said:

    Mr. Max, DS9 has a lot to like. Damar's arc springs to mind, and the conversation Kira has with him about whether or not to bomb facilities after the Dominion choose to make sure every one has Cardassians present is interesting for the moral quandry it raises.

    Mr. Seal, I hardly ever watch new stuff (although I did get a box set of the first three seasons of The Expanse and liked it a lot. May watch House of the Dragon at some point). A problem can be when something seeks to claim the fanbase of an IP then changes it utterly for a 'modern audience' (Velma could be such an example).

    And sometimes writing quality is just atrocious. Yes, Galadriel taking a pyroclastic flow to the face and being just fine. I'm looking at you.

    The trouble is writers can't resist the Wokery.

    And, when they do, people just turn off.
    I stumbled across a series called “the boys” (I usually don’t like superhero things) and have never watched anything so non-correct. Attacks certain political positions but not from a pearl clutching standpoint and with dark humour.

    The best thing is that I have never heard the banned “C” word used so much outside of mumsnet.
    The Boys is fantastic. Karl Urban proving once again what a great actor he is. Also worth watching Preacher which was also written by Garth Ennis. Made by the same team and has the same black humour.

    Unless you are religious. If you are religious you probably won't enjoy it.
    The Boys is excellent. I am running out of tv drama to watch in the Kok but that’s kept me going

    Barbarians Season Two is, by contrast, beyond poor. It’s like a Parody of Wokeness but written by Woke people. In the 14th minute of season 2 episode 1 there’s a handy Carthaginian princess to be black and female and powerful and in minute 36 it turns out the brutal Roman general is actually having a tragic gay affair with the Teutonic chieftain

    Then I gave up
    I quite enjoyed Season 1, but Season 2 sounds like crap.

    Spartacus, OTOH, I thought was great at showing what life would have been like in the ancient world (other than giving gladiators superhuman fighting skills against soldiers. What actually made Spartacus so formidable is that he trained his followers to fight like soldiers).

    The sheer vileness of ancient slavery was really brought home in that series.


    I really enjoyed Season 1. Season 2 is absolute shite. It’s not just the incessant Wokeness - the dialogue is dire and the drama insipid. These may all be linked, of course: scriptwriters primarily chosen for Wokeness are more likely to be crap
  • Options
    algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 10,541
    ydoethur said:

    DougSeal said:

    DougSeal said:

    DougSeal said:

    boulay said:

    DougSeal said:

    kle4 said:

    DougSeal said:

    ohnotnow said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    Convinced my wife a few months ago to watch DS9, she's not hugely into sci-fi but I sold it as a character drama more than anything else. She's really enjoying it, we got to Far Beyond the Stars (captain Sisko transports back to 1950s segregated America in a vision) this morning after putting Jen down for her nap. She was actually amazed at how good it is and how relevant it is today.

    What I think has impressed her most over the whole run is how well having a black captain was done. The reason she agreed was because she watched Discovery originally and found it merely ok so I suggested we go back to peak ST which for me is DS9. Coming back to this morning's episode she thinks if it was released today it would get lauded as one of the best TV episodes made. Have to say I agree, it really is brilliant.

    DS9 is amazing.

    Also enjoying the new Picard. Why it took them until Season 3 to deliver what everyone wanted I don't know.
    Haven't started Picard season 3, the first two were so awful so I'm waiting until it's all out to watch it.

    On the latter it's because modern TV writers have planet sized egos. They can't admit they got it wrong, season 3 has got a new writing team after Paramount sacked the original team after season 2 flopped. The Witcher suffers from this issue and Amazon will need to get a new writing team for Rings of Power as well. The Witcher writers managed to push Henry Cavill out and with him I think the audience goes too so Netflix will have to choose after season 4 flops whether to cancel it or sack the writers and bring back Henry Cavill with a team that will actually respect the source material. Same as Rings of Power.

    If you look at the most successful recent shows they are House of the Dragon and The Last of Us, both of them respect the brilliant source material and bring it all to life. In games Hogwarts Legacy has been a huge success and that's because it is a love letter to the Harry Potter universe and really respects everything JK Rowling wrote.
    I didn't even make it to the end of S1 of Picard. Though I did enjoy the 'Strange New Worlds'. Closest thing to 'real Star Trek' they've put out in a long while.
    It is worrying that there’s so much time and effort put into keeping very old franchises alive rather than trying to create new ones.
    Eh, a bit. Even more than normal nostalgia reboots and revivals are very high right now. But there's nothing wrong in itself in redoing older stuff. Thats how they become part of our culture.

    Why keep keeping Shakespeare alive?
    Fair point. But they’re not writing new Shakespeare. “Macbeth 2: The Quickening” anyone?
    Hamlet 2: Still Can't Decide.
    King Lear: The Next Generation
    A Spring’s Tale.
    Richard the Fourth
    Henry IV, Part 2.
    Much ado about Something
    Thirteenth Night.
    Shakespeare did write Love’s Labour’s Won and Cordelia although we don’t have the manuscripts as they were never published even in the Folio.
    We don't possess any Shakespeare manuscripts.

  • Options
    GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,079
    I don't understand why people still want to talk about lockdown. I would rather forget it ever happened to be honest.
  • Options
    Morris_DancerMorris_Dancer Posts: 60,984
    I know I'd said good day but I had to come back to remark that Alonso topped FP3.

    Gosh.
  • Options
    squareroot2squareroot2 Posts: 6,355
    Boris is just a side show. He is irrelevant.
  • Options
    rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 54,001
    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    I think in hindsight we should have locked the over 60s and very vulnerable indoors but everyone else should have been free. I naively assumed we’d get some kind of gratitude or sympathy for what we did but no we just get fucked over again and again. Sick of it.

    I think you let your anger colour a rational appreciation of reality. Many, many people under 60 died, and many more would have if we had simply locked up the over 60s. Besides, you’d never pass such a law. What next? Only under 30s to wear tight jeans?
    At the time you were one of the most strident in calling for lockdowns. Endless posts of ‘lockdown now’. It was never just about protecting the elderly. Prior to vaccination covid could take people of any age, albeit skewed to the older population, just like flu. The lockdowns were to prevent stress on the healthcare system so that deaths from other causes didn’t happen. You think the ambulance waits were bad recently? Wonder what would have happened if we had not locked down in March 2020.

    There is one awful counterfactual out there. A do nothing approach, have a huge wave, infect most and then recover. No idea how many would have died but plausibly over a million when secondary death is included due to the lack of healthcare. But we would have been through it quicker. It’s just that few societies would accept that risk.
    I think the anti-lockdown crowd also forget that the vast majority of people were already locking themselves down in advance of the official rules. Shops were closing, pubs and cafes were empty. This matters because the economy was grinding to a halt but without it being official the systems to provide support to our economy, to all the businesses that were going to go bust, would have been a lot more difficult if not impossible.

    So the end result would have been more people dying but less support for people to survive. Far more people would have been forced to put themselves in danger for purely economic reasons and the country would have come out of it in a far worse place.
    That's people's personal choice at that point which is what should have been after lockdown 1. You're supposed to be a liberal.
    I am a liberal not an anarchist. What you propose would have resulted in anarchy. Far more economic damage to the country and far more deaths.

    Saying people have a choice when that choice is to catch covid or lose their jobs is really not very liberal at all.
    No it's not anarchy, it's allowing people to make the choice that's best for them, even at the time the risk factors from COVID for working age people were very low.
    It would have been anarchy when the hospitals could no longer cope and treat all those younger people with normal illnesses and injuries. Moreover it would not have helped the high street with most people boycotting pubs and restaurants and no government support in place.
    And yet countries which let people make the choice didn't have those issues. And wrt healthcare you deprioritise COVID cases among those who have the lowest chance of survival at least with the NHS given it is resource limited. It might sound harsh but ultimately the alternative choice has proved to be a disaster. The UK is stuffed, we've got no money left, the highest tax burden in a generation and no growth prospects as young people start to realise there's nothing for them here.
    There were very few countries - if any - with no restrictions at all.

    Take Sweden: sure, there were very few national restrictions, but they allows cities to impose additional burdens, And Stockholm by mid 2021 was not so very different to other big cities in Europe. (As it happens, I think limiting national restrictions, but allowing local ones is a pretty smart idea that recognizes that different places have different population densities, average ages, etc.)
  • Options
    LeonLeon Posts: 47,237
    rcs1000 said:

    "Lockdown" is a terrible word and covers a very wide variety of sins.

    A much better way of looking at this has to be restrictions, and what impact they had on the spread of the virus, as opposed to the costs on personal freedoms.

    So restrictions on nightclubs probably made a lot of sense, as did a requirement to wear masks in rush hour on public transport.

    While preventing people from meeting others, even outside!, was a massive invasion of personal liberty with very little evidence it will have had any meaningful impact on the spread of the virus.

    It was grotesque. It was quite Pol Pot esque, when you think about it. A surreal perversion of normal life for some infantile creed and no obvious purpose
  • Options
    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,249

    I know I'd said good day but I had to come back to remark that Alonso topped FP3.

    Gosh.

    If he wins tomorrow (which he won't) I would give ten pounds to be a fly on the wall in one of the following locations:

    1) Vettel's house
    2) The Alpine garage
    3) Red Bull's head office.

    Mind, I'd want to be well out of swatting distance.
  • Options
    Sean_FSean_F Posts: 35,850
    Leon said:

    Sean_F said:

    Leon said:

    boulay said:

    Mr. Max, DS9 has a lot to like. Damar's arc springs to mind, and the conversation Kira has with him about whether or not to bomb facilities after the Dominion choose to make sure every one has Cardassians present is interesting for the moral quandry it raises.

    Mr. Seal, I hardly ever watch new stuff (although I did get a box set of the first three seasons of The Expanse and liked it a lot. May watch House of the Dragon at some point). A problem can be when something seeks to claim the fanbase of an IP then changes it utterly for a 'modern audience' (Velma could be such an example).

    And sometimes writing quality is just atrocious. Yes, Galadriel taking a pyroclastic flow to the face and being just fine. I'm looking at you.

    The trouble is writers can't resist the Wokery.

    And, when they do, people just turn off.
    I stumbled across a series called “the boys” (I usually don’t like superhero things) and have never watched anything so non-correct. Attacks certain political positions but not from a pearl clutching standpoint and with dark humour.

    The best thing is that I have never heard the banned “C” word used so much outside of mumsnet.
    The Boys is fantastic. Karl Urban proving once again what a great actor he is. Also worth watching Preacher which was also written by Garth Ennis. Made by the same team and has the same black humour.

    Unless you are religious. If you are religious you probably won't enjoy it.
    The Boys is excellent. I am running out of tv drama to watch in the Kok but that’s kept me going

    Barbarians Season Two is, by contrast, beyond poor. It’s like a Parody of Wokeness but written by Woke people. In the 14th minute of season 2 episode 1 there’s a handy Carthaginian princess to be black and female and powerful and in minute 36 it turns out the brutal Roman general is actually having a tragic gay affair with the Teutonic chieftain

    Then I gave up
    I quite enjoyed Season 1, but Season 2 sounds like crap.

    Spartacus, OTOH, I thought was great at showing what life would have been like in the ancient world (other than giving gladiators superhuman fighting skills against soldiers. What actually made Spartacus so formidable is that he trained his followers to fight like soldiers).

    The sheer vileness of ancient slavery was really brought home in that series.


    I really enjoyed Season 1. Season 2 is absolute shite. It’s not just the incessant Wokeness - the dialogue is dire and the drama insipid. These may all be linked, of course: scriptwriters primarily chosen for Wokeness are more likely to be crap
    A good writer has to be willing to give offence.
  • Options
    Stark_DawningStark_Dawning Posts: 9,305

    I don't understand why people still want to talk about lockdown. I would rather forget it ever happened to be honest.

    Lockdown is a huge issue for the British Right. If they can pin the countries predicaments on that - rather than Brexit, Boris, Truss etc. - then that's a huge face saver. There's a lot at stake here.

  • Options
    Morris_DancerMorris_Dancer Posts: 60,984
    Mr. Doethur, he was 19 to win pre-practice, and 3.8 for a podium.

    On Betfair, currently layable at 5.9 and 2.1 respectively.
  • Options
    TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 40,115
    edited March 2023
    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    "Lockdown" is a terrible word and covers a very wide variety of sins.

    A much better way of looking at this has to be restrictions, and what impact they had on the spread of the virus, as opposed to the costs on personal freedoms.

    So restrictions on nightclubs probably made a lot of sense, as did a requirement to wear masks in rush hour on public transport.

    While preventing people from meeting others, even outside!, was a massive invasion of personal liberty with very little evidence it will have had any meaningful impact on the spread of the virus.

    It was grotesque. It was quite Pol Pot esque, when you think about it. A surreal perversion of normal life for some infantile creed and no obvious purpose
    Careful, that Sean T will be nicking this ridiculous comparison (a concept to which he is no stranger) for his next Speccie piece.
  • Options
    JonathanJonathan Posts: 20,901

    rcs1000 said:

    Stocky said:

    I think in hindsight we should have locked the over 60s and very vulnerable indoors but everyone else should have been free. I naively assumed we’d get some kind of gratitude or sympathy for what we did but no we just get fucked over again and again. Sick of it.

    The Great Barrington Declaration, in other words.

    https://unherd.com/2022/01/has-the-great-barrington-declaration-been-vindicated/
    There were a lot of mistakes with the UK lockdown: it was significantly harsher than it needed to be, lasted too long, and had no meaningful risk segmentation.

    The consequence of these mistakes was that - although the UK sourced vaccines earlier than our continental neighbours - we didn't reap any benefits as far as greater freedom, earlier release, or even less economic damage.

    I was lucky enough to spend the pandemic in California, where - sure - the weather helped. But it was not just that: there were never any restrictions on meeting up outside, nor indeed would you ever have been prevented from visiting a friend's house. California's significantly less onerous restrictions crushed R every bit as effectively as the UK's, with far less impact on personal freedoms.

    Or Denmark, where they went the high tech route, with everyone having testing passes on their phone, and the frequency with which needed to test depending on the extent to which you interacted with vulnerable groups. This enabled them to keep their economy much more open than we did (they had negligible economic impact), while also seeing almost no excess deaths.
    It is true that Sturgeon, Drakeford and Starmer would have has us in lockdown much longer if they could
    They probably wouldn’t have needed to.
  • Options
    LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 15,271

    I don't understand why people still want to talk about lockdown. I would rather forget it ever happened to be honest.

    There's a non-negligible risk that another pandemic virus emerges in our lifetimes, so it's a good idea to argue this out now and be prepared for what to do next time.

    I'd like to see work done on filtration, to make transmission of airborne viruses less likely in indoor spaces. We should consider why masks were so ineffective, whether they're worth bothering with next time, or what we can do differently to improve their efficacy (better mask designs, valved masks, minimum standards, etc).

    There's lots of things we should be able to do differently next time to reduce the deaths suffered and the inconvenience. And we should remember the things that we did well - such as treatment studies and vaccination development.
  • Options
    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,249
    Sean_F said:

    Leon said:

    Sean_F said:

    Leon said:

    boulay said:

    Mr. Max, DS9 has a lot to like. Damar's arc springs to mind, and the conversation Kira has with him about whether or not to bomb facilities after the Dominion choose to make sure every one has Cardassians present is interesting for the moral quandry it raises.

    Mr. Seal, I hardly ever watch new stuff (although I did get a box set of the first three seasons of The Expanse and liked it a lot. May watch House of the Dragon at some point). A problem can be when something seeks to claim the fanbase of an IP then changes it utterly for a 'modern audience' (Velma could be such an example).

    And sometimes writing quality is just atrocious. Yes, Galadriel taking a pyroclastic flow to the face and being just fine. I'm looking at you.

    The trouble is writers can't resist the Wokery.

    And, when they do, people just turn off.
    I stumbled across a series called “the boys” (I usually don’t like superhero things) and have never watched anything so non-correct. Attacks certain political positions but not from a pearl clutching standpoint and with dark humour.

    The best thing is that I have never heard the banned “C” word used so much outside of mumsnet.
    The Boys is fantastic. Karl Urban proving once again what a great actor he is. Also worth watching Preacher which was also written by Garth Ennis. Made by the same team and has the same black humour.

    Unless you are religious. If you are religious you probably won't enjoy it.
    The Boys is excellent. I am running out of tv drama to watch in the Kok but that’s kept me going

    Barbarians Season Two is, by contrast, beyond poor. It’s like a Parody of Wokeness but written by Woke people. In the 14th minute of season 2 episode 1 there’s a handy Carthaginian princess to be black and female and powerful and in minute 36 it turns out the brutal Roman general is actually having a tragic gay affair with the Teutonic chieftain

    Then I gave up
    I quite enjoyed Season 1, but Season 2 sounds like crap.

    Spartacus, OTOH, I thought was great at showing what life would have been like in the ancient world (other than giving gladiators superhuman fighting skills against soldiers. What actually made Spartacus so formidable is that he trained his followers to fight like soldiers).

    The sheer vileness of ancient slavery was really brought home in that series.


    I really enjoyed Season 1. Season 2 is absolute shite. It’s not just the incessant Wokeness - the dialogue is dire and the drama insipid. These may all be linked, of course: scriptwriters primarily chosen for Wokeness are more likely to be crap
    A good writer has to be willing to give offence.
    That would make Leon a great writer if he only ditched the day job knapping flint dildos.
  • Options
    LeonLeon Posts: 47,237
    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    "Lockdown" is a terrible word and covers a very wide variety of sins.

    A much better way of looking at this has to be restrictions, and what impact they had on the spread of the virus, as opposed to the costs on personal freedoms.

    So restrictions on nightclubs probably made a lot of sense, as did a requirement to wear masks in rush hour on public transport.

    While preventing people from meeting others, even outside!, was a massive invasion of personal liberty with very little evidence it will have had any meaningful impact on the spread of the virus.

    It was grotesque. It was quite Pol Pot esque, when you think about it. A surreal perversion of normal life for some infantile creed and no obvious purpose
    It's funny, because I was reading an article by a man called Sean Thomas today, about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In it he described people smashing the heads of children against a tree, having been instructed to laugh out loud while swinging the infants.

    And you know what, I thought "wow, that was just like lockdown."

    My thoughts entirely!
  • Options
    StuartinromfordStuartinromford Posts: 14,460

    I don't understand why people still want to talk about lockdown. I would rather forget it ever happened to be honest.

    There's a non-negligible risk that another pandemic virus emerges in our lifetimes, so it's a good idea to argue this out now and be prepared for what to do next time.

    I'd like to see work done on filtration, to make transmission of airborne viruses less likely in indoor spaces. We should consider why masks were so ineffective, whether they're worth bothering with next time, or what we can do differently to improve their efficacy (better mask designs, valved masks, minimum standards, etc).

    There's lots of things we should be able to do differently next time to reduce the deaths suffered and the inconvenience. And we should remember the things that we did well - such as treatment studies and vaccination development.
    Given that the UK tends to do badly from respiritory illnesses every single year, air filtration seems like an obvious thing to do cost-benefit on. In schools, for example, I'd be pretty confident that it would quickly pay for itself in reduced staff and pupil absence.

    As for vaccines, 2020 showed us how quickly we can mass-produce something new if we really put our minds to it. Ultimately, that's why Sweden got it wrong. They planned for a Covid pandemic lasting 2-3 years before we could jab our way out of it. Had we known that the vaccines were likely to be so quick and so good, hunkering down while we waited would have seemed much more plausible.
  • Options
    Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,358
    Leon said:

    Sean_F said:

    Leon said:

    boulay said:

    Mr. Max, DS9 has a lot to like. Damar's arc springs to mind, and the conversation Kira has with him about whether or not to bomb facilities after the Dominion choose to make sure every one has Cardassians present is interesting for the moral quandry it raises.

    Mr. Seal, I hardly ever watch new stuff (although I did get a box set of the first three seasons of The Expanse and liked it a lot. May watch House of the Dragon at some point). A problem can be when something seeks to claim the fanbase of an IP then changes it utterly for a 'modern audience' (Velma could be such an example).

    And sometimes writing quality is just atrocious. Yes, Galadriel taking a pyroclastic flow to the face and being just fine. I'm looking at you.

    The trouble is writers can't resist the Wokery.

    And, when they do, people just turn off.
    I stumbled across a series called “the boys” (I usually don’t like superhero things) and have never watched anything so non-correct. Attacks certain political positions but not from a pearl clutching standpoint and with dark humour.

    The best thing is that I have never heard the banned “C” word used so much outside of mumsnet.
    The Boys is fantastic. Karl Urban proving once again what a great actor he is. Also worth watching Preacher which was also written by Garth Ennis. Made by the same team and has the same black humour.

    Unless you are religious. If you are religious you probably won't enjoy it.
    The Boys is excellent. I am running out of tv drama to watch in the Kok but that’s kept me going

    Barbarians Season Two is, by contrast, beyond poor. It’s like a Parody of Wokeness but written by Woke people. In the 14th minute of season 2 episode 1 there’s a handy Carthaginian princess to be black and female and powerful and in minute 36 it turns out the brutal Roman general is actually having a tragic gay affair with the Teutonic chieftain

    Then I gave up
    I quite enjoyed Season 1, but Season 2 sounds like crap.

    Spartacus, OTOH, I thought was great at showing what life would have been like in the ancient world (other than giving gladiators superhuman fighting skills against soldiers. What actually made Spartacus so formidable is that he trained his followers to fight like soldiers).

    The sheer vileness of ancient slavery was really brought home in that series.


    I really enjoyed Season 1. Season 2 is absolute shite. It’s not just the incessant Wokeness - the dialogue is dire and the drama insipid. These may all be linked, of course: scriptwriters primarily chosen for Wokeness are more likely to be crap
    That's exactly what happens.

    Thankfully, I think a number of strategic checks against this bullshit dogma are due to be delivered in the next few years.
  • Options
    Stark_DawningStark_Dawning Posts: 9,305
    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    "Lockdown" is a terrible word and covers a very wide variety of sins.

    A much better way of looking at this has to be restrictions, and what impact they had on the spread of the virus, as opposed to the costs on personal freedoms.

    So restrictions on nightclubs probably made a lot of sense, as did a requirement to wear masks in rush hour on public transport.

    While preventing people from meeting others, even outside!, was a massive invasion of personal liberty with very little evidence it will have had any meaningful impact on the spread of the virus.

    It was grotesque. It was quite Pol Pot esque, when you think about it. A surreal perversion of normal life for some infantile creed and no obvious purpose
    It's funny, because I was reading an article by a man called Sean Thomas today, about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In it he described people smashing the heads of children against a tree, having been instructed to laugh out loud while swinging the infants.

    And you know what, I thought "wow, that was just like lockdown."

    I seem to remember SeanT reporting that he'd seen someone coughing in the fruit isle of his local supermarket and wanting to 'bury a knife in his head'. So perhaps for him it was.
  • Options
    Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,358

    Spot on comments from @Casino_Royale and @Leon earlier - too many nations thinking they can demand something of us because we are too lacking in balls to tell them to fuck off.

    For me, the epitome of that pussy attitude is George Osborne - a man who is quite willing to sell out any interest as long as it benefits himself. His attitude over the Elgin Marbles is only the latest example, with probably his most egregious act being the whole Graphene issue and the Chinese. Truly a man who will quite happily get on his knees and suck anything as long as money is involved.

    George Osborne is, essentially, an ambitious self-serving globalist Blairite who wants slightly lower taxes and would sell his granny to get it.

    It's why he was so unpopular in office.
  • Options
    WillGWillG Posts: 2,097

    I don't understand why people still want to talk about lockdown. I would rather forget it ever happened to be honest.

    There's a non-negligible risk that another pandemic virus emerges in our lifetimes, so it's a good idea to argue this out now and be prepared for what to do next time.

    I'd like to see work done on filtration, to make transmission of airborne viruses less likely in indoor spaces. We should consider why masks were so ineffective, whether they're worth bothering with next time, or what we can do differently to improve their efficacy (better mask designs, valved masks, minimum standards, etc).

    There's lots of things we should be able to do differently next time to reduce the deaths suffered and the inconvenience. And we should remember the things that we did well - such as treatment studies and vaccination development.
    Masks aren't ineffective. The studies that claim they were actually are just studies that show Americans are entitled numpties that don't listen to rules. The effects of mask mandates in Germany, for example, immediately slowed the spread of the virus.

    As for the determining policy based on future pandemics, it is largely futile because we won't know the dynamics of the next virus. What if it has a 10% death rate rather than 2%, and mainly affects children?

    The main thing I learned from lockdown was how mentally weak and lacking in grit the modern day West is. Yes, there were specific circumstances where restrictions were excessive (e.g. visiting elderly relatives) but for most people it was just staying in your home. Modern technology also meant you could easily chat to anyone over Zoom. Comparing that to losing, say, 100k more people forever... well, it was just entitled.
  • Options
    Stark_DawningStark_Dawning Posts: 9,305
    WillG said:

    I don't understand why people still want to talk about lockdown. I would rather forget it ever happened to be honest.

    There's a non-negligible risk that another pandemic virus emerges in our lifetimes, so it's a good idea to argue this out now and be prepared for what to do next time.

    I'd like to see work done on filtration, to make transmission of airborne viruses less likely in indoor spaces. We should consider why masks were so ineffective, whether they're worth bothering with next time, or what we can do differently to improve their efficacy (better mask designs, valved masks, minimum standards, etc).

    There's lots of things we should be able to do differently next time to reduce the deaths suffered and the inconvenience. And we should remember the things that we did well - such as treatment studies and vaccination development.
    Masks aren't ineffective. The studies that claim they were actually are just studies that show Americans are entitled numpties that don't listen to rules. The effects of mask mandates in Germany, for example, immediately slowed the spread of the virus.

    As for the determining policy based on future pandemics, it is largely futile because we won't know the dynamics of the next virus. What if it has a 10% death rate rather than 2%, and mainly affects children?

    The main thing I learned from lockdown was how mentally weak and lacking in grit the modern day West is. Yes, there were specific circumstances where restrictions were excessive (e.g. visiting elderly relatives) but for most people it was just staying in your home. Modern technology also meant you could easily chat to anyone over Zoom. Comparing that to losing, say, 100k more people forever... well, it was just entitled.
    Quite right. Lockdown was great. I missed the pub bit, but it saved me a fortune on season tickets.
  • Options
    Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,358

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    "Lockdown" is a terrible word and covers a very wide variety of sins.

    A much better way of looking at this has to be restrictions, and what impact they had on the spread of the virus, as opposed to the costs on personal freedoms.

    So restrictions on nightclubs probably made a lot of sense, as did a requirement to wear masks in rush hour on public transport.

    While preventing people from meeting others, even outside!, was a massive invasion of personal liberty with very little evidence it will have had any meaningful impact on the spread of the virus.

    It was grotesque. It was quite Pol Pot esque, when you think about it. A surreal perversion of normal life for some infantile creed and no obvious purpose
    It's funny, because I was reading an article by a man called Sean Thomas today, about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In it he described people smashing the heads of children against a tree, having been instructed to laugh out loud while swinging the infants.

    And you know what, I thought "wow, that was just like lockdown."

    I seem to remember SeanT reporting that he'd seen someone coughing in the fruit isle of his local supermarket and wanting to 'bury a knife in his head'. So perhaps for him it was.
    I've just gone to one of my favourite pubs in Alresford and discovered their specials board is now entirely "plant based" - and venison as the meat option on the main menu, which is the Wokies choice of meat - and now I want to bury a knife in the new owner/chefs head, so I know what that feels like.

    Might be why they only have three covers at 1pm on a Saturday.
  • Options
    WillGWillG Posts: 2,097
    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    I think in hindsight we should have locked the over 60s and very vulnerable indoors but everyone else should have been free. I naively assumed we’d get some kind of gratitude or sympathy for what we did but no we just get fucked over again and again. Sick of it.

    I think you let your anger colour a rational appreciation of reality. Many, many people under 60 died, and many more would have if we had simply locked up the over 60s. Besides, you’d never pass such a law. What next? Only under 30s to wear tight jeans?
    At the time you were one of the most strident in calling for lockdowns. Endless posts of ‘lockdown now’. It was never just about protecting the elderly. Prior to vaccination covid could take people of any age, albeit skewed to the older population, just like flu. The lockdowns were to prevent stress on the healthcare system so that deaths from other causes didn’t happen. You think the ambulance waits were bad recently? Wonder what would have happened if we had not locked down in March 2020.

    There is one awful counterfactual out there. A do nothing approach, have a huge wave, infect most and then recover. No idea how many would have died but plausibly over a million when secondary death is included due to the lack of healthcare. But we would have been through it quicker. It’s just that few societies would accept that risk.
    I think the anti-lockdown crowd also forget that the vast majority of people were already locking themselves down in advance of the official rules. Shops were closing, pubs and cafes were empty. This matters because the economy was grinding to a halt but without it being official the systems to provide support to our economy, to all the businesses that were going to go bust, would have been a lot more difficult if not impossible.

    So the end result would have been more people dying but less support for people to survive. Far more people would have been forced to put themselves in danger for purely economic reasons and the country would have come out of it in a far worse place.
    That's people's personal choice at that point which is what should have been after lockdown 1. You're supposed to be a liberal.
    I am a liberal not an anarchist. What you propose would have resulted in anarchy. Far more economic damage to the country and far more deaths.

    Saying people have a choice when that choice is to catch covid or lose their jobs is really not very liberal at all.
    No it's not anarchy, it's allowing people to make the choice that's best for them, even at the time the risk factors from COVID for working age people were very low.
    It would have been anarchy when the hospitals could no longer cope and treat all those younger people with normal illnesses and injuries. Moreover it would not have helped the high street with most people boycotting pubs and restaurants and no government support in place.
    And yet countries which let people make the choice didn't have those issues. And wrt healthcare you deprioritise COVID cases among those who have the lowest chance of survival at least with the NHS given it is resource limited. It might sound harsh but ultimately the alternative choice has proved to be a disaster. The UK is stuffed, we've got no money left, the highest tax burden in a generation and no growth prospects as young people start to realise there's nothing for them here.
    There were very few countries - if any - with no restrictions at all.

    Take Sweden: sure, there were very few national restrictions, but they allows cities to impose additional burdens, And Stockholm by mid 2021 was not so very different to other big cities in Europe. (As it happens, I think limiting national restrictions, but allowing local ones is a pretty smart idea that recognizes that different places have different population densities, average ages, etc.)
    Sweden had the massive advantage of low population density and most of the population having remote lake houses they could retreat to. And a rule following population that meant milder restrictions were as effective as harsher ones elsewhere.
  • Options
    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 44,426

    Mr. Malmesbury, "To be fair, when it came to populist demagoguery, Athens led the world. "

    Yep, Demosthenes got them all fired up ahead of the Battle of Chaeronea. Ahem.

    Invasion of Sicily?
  • Options
    Stark_DawningStark_Dawning Posts: 9,305

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    "Lockdown" is a terrible word and covers a very wide variety of sins.

    A much better way of looking at this has to be restrictions, and what impact they had on the spread of the virus, as opposed to the costs on personal freedoms.

    So restrictions on nightclubs probably made a lot of sense, as did a requirement to wear masks in rush hour on public transport.

    While preventing people from meeting others, even outside!, was a massive invasion of personal liberty with very little evidence it will have had any meaningful impact on the spread of the virus.

    It was grotesque. It was quite Pol Pot esque, when you think about it. A surreal perversion of normal life for some infantile creed and no obvious purpose
    It's funny, because I was reading an article by a man called Sean Thomas today, about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In it he described people smashing the heads of children against a tree, having been instructed to laugh out loud while swinging the infants.

    And you know what, I thought "wow, that was just like lockdown."

    I seem to remember SeanT reporting that he'd seen someone coughing in the fruit isle of his local supermarket and wanting to 'bury a knife in his head'. So perhaps for him it was.
    I've just gone to one of my favourite pubs in Alresford and discovered their specials board is now entirely "plant based" - and venison as the meat option on the main menu, which is the Wokies choice of meat - and now I want to bury a knife in the new owner/chefs head, so I know what that feels like.

    Might be why they only have three covers at 1pm on a Saturday.
    Venison is woke? Why? Isn't that the only mammal meat you can get that has to be hunted not farmed?
  • Options
    WillGWillG Posts: 2,097

    WillG said:

    I don't understand why people still want to talk about lockdown. I would rather forget it ever happened to be honest.

    There's a non-negligible risk that another pandemic virus emerges in our lifetimes, so it's a good idea to argue this out now and be prepared for what to do next time.

    I'd like to see work done on filtration, to make transmission of airborne viruses less likely in indoor spaces. We should consider why masks were so ineffective, whether they're worth bothering with next time, or what we can do differently to improve their efficacy (better mask designs, valved masks, minimum standards, etc).

    There's lots of things we should be able to do differently next time to reduce the deaths suffered and the inconvenience. And we should remember the things that we did well - such as treatment studies and vaccination development.
    Masks aren't ineffective. The studies that claim they were actually are just studies that show Americans are entitled numpties that don't listen to rules. The effects of mask mandates in Germany, for example, immediately slowed the spread of the virus.

    As for the determining policy based on future pandemics, it is largely futile because we won't know the dynamics of the next virus. What if it has a 10% death rate rather than 2%, and mainly affects children?

    The main thing I learned from lockdown was how mentally weak and lacking in grit the modern day West is. Yes, there were specific circumstances where restrictions were excessive (e.g. visiting elderly relatives) but for most people it was just staying in your home. Modern technology also meant you could easily chat to anyone over Zoom. Comparing that to losing, say, 100k more people forever... well, it was just entitled.
    Quite right. Lockdown was great. I missed the pub bit, but it saved me a fortune on season tickets.
    I personally found it very hard, as we had a new baby and couldn't get any parental or babysitting support. Plus I had to adapt to a new way of working while homeschooling older kids. Definitely the hardest year of my life. But, I didn't spread the virus to anyone and certainly saved lives.

    I have almost certainly infected people since the vaccines came out, but at that point, it's like spreading the flu to anyone responsible. Anti-vaxxers took their own risks.
  • Options

    I don't understand why people still want to talk about lockdown. I would rather forget it ever happened to be honest.

    Lockdown is a huge issue for the British Right. If they can pin the countries predicaments on that - rather than Brexit, Boris, Truss etc. - then that's a huge face saver. There's a lot at stake here.

    But their problem is that the people driving Brexit - the elderly - were the same people driving lockdown, as in the opinion poll where 21% thought nightclubs should never re-open.
  • Options

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    "Lockdown" is a terrible word and covers a very wide variety of sins.

    A much better way of looking at this has to be restrictions, and what impact they had on the spread of the virus, as opposed to the costs on personal freedoms.

    So restrictions on nightclubs probably made a lot of sense, as did a requirement to wear masks in rush hour on public transport.

    While preventing people from meeting others, even outside!, was a massive invasion of personal liberty with very little evidence it will have had any meaningful impact on the spread of the virus.

    It was grotesque. It was quite Pol Pot esque, when you think about it. A surreal perversion of normal life for some infantile creed and no obvious purpose
    It's funny, because I was reading an article by a man called Sean Thomas today, about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In it he described people smashing the heads of children against a tree, having been instructed to laugh out loud while swinging the infants.

    And you know what, I thought "wow, that was just like lockdown."

    I seem to remember SeanT reporting that he'd seen someone coughing in the fruit isle of his local supermarket and wanting to 'bury a knife in his head'. So perhaps for him it was.
    I've just gone to one of my favourite pubs in Alresford and discovered their specials board is now entirely "plant based" - and venison as the meat option on the main menu, which is the Wokies choice of meat - and now I want to bury a knife in the new owner/chefs head, so I know what that feels like.

    Might be why they only have three covers at 1pm on a Saturday.
    Venison is woke? Why? Isn't that the only mammal meat you can get that has to be hunted not farmed?
    I studied Environmental Science for some time. Venison is one of the best meats we could eat in the UK, nothing woke about it.
  • Options
    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 44,426

    I don't understand why people still want to talk about lockdown. I would rather forget it ever happened to be honest.

    There's a non-negligible risk that another pandemic virus emerges in our lifetimes, so it's a good idea to argue this out now and be prepared for what to do next time.

    I'd like to see work done on filtration, to make transmission of airborne viruses less likely in indoor spaces. We should consider why masks were so ineffective, whether they're worth bothering with next time, or what we can do differently to improve their efficacy (better mask designs, valved masks, minimum standards, etc).

    There's lots of things we should be able to do differently next time to reduce the deaths suffered and the inconvenience. And we should remember the things that we did well - such as treatment studies and vaccination development.
    Paper masks have a small effect.

    N95 have a massive effect. Being actually designed, manufactured and tested to a standard that they stop virus sized particles.

    A strange urban legend has grown up that N95 are hard to wear, seal or breathe through.

    Strangely, people slinging insulation on building sites can manage fairly active manual labour, all day, wearing them.
  • Options
    WillGWillG Posts: 2,097
    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    I think in hindsight we should have locked the over 60s and very vulnerable indoors but everyone else should have been free. I naively assumed we’d get some kind of gratitude or sympathy for what we did but no we just get fucked over again and again. Sick of it.

    I think you let your anger colour a rational appreciation of reality. Many, many people under 60 died, and many more would have if we had simply locked up the over 60s. Besides, you’d never pass such a law. What next? Only under 30s to wear tight jeans?
    At the time you were one of the most strident in calling for lockdowns. Endless posts of ‘lockdown now’. It was never just about protecting the elderly. Prior to vaccination covid could take people of any age, albeit skewed to the older population, just like flu. The lockdowns were to prevent stress on the healthcare system so that deaths from other causes didn’t happen. You think the ambulance waits were bad recently? Wonder what would have happened if we had not locked down in March 2020.

    There is one awful counterfactual out there. A do nothing approach, have a huge wave, infect most and then recover. No idea how many would have died but plausibly over a million when secondary death is included due to the lack of healthcare. But we would have been through it quicker. It’s just that few societies would accept that risk.
    I think the anti-lockdown crowd also forget that the vast majority of people were already locking themselves down in advance of the official rules. Shops were closing, pubs and cafes were empty. This matters because the economy was grinding to a halt but without it being official the systems to provide support to our economy, to all the businesses that were going to go bust, would have been a lot more difficult if not impossible.

    So the end result would have been more people dying but less support for people to survive. Far more people would have been forced to put themselves in danger for purely economic reasons and the country would have come out of it in a far worse place.
    That's people's personal choice at that point which is what should have been after lockdown 1. You're supposed to be a liberal.
    I am a liberal not an anarchist. What you propose would have resulted in anarchy. Far more economic damage to the country and far more deaths.

    Saying people have a choice when that choice is to catch covid or lose their jobs is really not very liberal at all.
    No it's not anarchy, it's allowing people to make the choice that's best for them, even at the time the risk factors from COVID for working age people were very low.
    It would have been anarchy when the hospitals could no longer cope and treat all those younger people with normal illnesses and injuries. Moreover it would not have helped the high street with most people boycotting pubs and restaurants and no government support in place.
    And yet countries which let people make the choice didn't have those issues. And wrt healthcare you deprioritise COVID cases among those who have the lowest chance of survival at least with the NHS given it is resource limited. It might sound harsh but ultimately the alternative choice has proved to be a disaster. The UK is stuffed, we've got no money left, the highest tax burden in a generation and no growth prospects as young people start to realise there's nothing for them here.
    UK growth prospects have been hammered by decades of relying just on financial services, ramping up the population with low skill workers and not building enough houses or infrastructure. And, even given all that, the lower living standards of young people are still far better than the standards my parents generation had growing up. Expecting many of them to die to fund better lifestyles is horrific.
  • Options
    noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 20,761

    Boris is just a side show. He is irrelevant.

    I thought that was Bob?
  • Options
    Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,358

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    "Lockdown" is a terrible word and covers a very wide variety of sins.

    A much better way of looking at this has to be restrictions, and what impact they had on the spread of the virus, as opposed to the costs on personal freedoms.

    So restrictions on nightclubs probably made a lot of sense, as did a requirement to wear masks in rush hour on public transport.

    While preventing people from meeting others, even outside!, was a massive invasion of personal liberty with very little evidence it will have had any meaningful impact on the spread of the virus.

    It was grotesque. It was quite Pol Pot esque, when you think about it. A surreal perversion of normal life for some infantile creed and no obvious purpose
    It's funny, because I was reading an article by a man called Sean Thomas today, about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In it he described people smashing the heads of children against a tree, having been instructed to laugh out loud while swinging the infants.

    And you know what, I thought "wow, that was just like lockdown."

    I seem to remember SeanT reporting that he'd seen someone coughing in the fruit isle of his local supermarket and wanting to 'bury a knife in his head'. So perhaps for him it was.
    I've just gone to one of my favourite pubs in Alresford and discovered their specials board is now entirely "plant based" - and venison as the meat option on the main menu, which is the Wokies choice of meat - and now I want to bury a knife in the new owner/chefs head, so I know what that feels like.

    Might be why they only have three covers at 1pm on a Saturday.
    Venison is woke? Why? Isn't that the only mammal meat you can get that has to be hunted not farmed?
    It's the sort of meat Greens and Lefties offer as an "alternative" to their veganism, and isn't very popular.

    Trust me, it's Woke.
  • Options
    Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 25,458
    MaxPB said:

    Mr. Royale, sometimes, that's true. The thing is, competence affects this too.

    A smarter writing group could've had a checklist of skin colours in Rings of Power by setting it in Harad. But because they're ignorant they have tokenistic efforts. Let's say, for argument's sake, there are black dwarves. You don't get just one. That's not how genetics work. So you need either more present on screen, or emphasise that the marriage was political initially (uniting a white dwarf clan and black dwarf clan in alliance) but they've grown to love one another. It just needs a sentence. But having Disa as a solo black dwarf makes it seem like she was thrust from the heavens into Middle-Earth. And having small communities with wildly varying skin tones in a fantastical but roughly medieval setting betrays an incredible level of demographic and historical ignorance. A more cosmopolitian approach in a huge city can work better to a degree (although you still end up with distinct districts) but in a village?

    It's akin to comically 'sensitive' idiots who were upset that Kingdom Come: Deliverance (set in a few square miles of Bohemia in 1403) had only white people in it.

    The thing is they should start with writing an amazing story, and then challenge themselves if they've cast the casting net as fairly and as broadly as possible in finding the right actors to perform it. But otherwise let the chips fall where they will.

    That's the right way to do it.

    Instead they think: "Right, Diversity. How do we check all the boxes, in the right proportions, and show we have the right values here?" And, thus, put identity politics at the centre of everything they do, with the story coming a poor second, if at all.

    They then create patronising hectoring shite, acted by non-entities saying and doing fuck all of interest, except Wokey lectures, which no-one watches.
    Yes, and this is what my wife pointed out about DS9, it's got a black captain and woman as first officer. They didn't start from there and then write a narrative around it, they wrote a narrative and then fit those characters into it.
    Sci Fi always reflects the values of when it's made. When 90's Star Trek was made, you had strong themes of social justice and racism being wrong, but not the current identity politics. You also had a loy of optimism and prosperity. It was in a lot of ways the ideal time to make TV drama.
  • Options
    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 44,426

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    "Lockdown" is a terrible word and covers a very wide variety of sins.

    A much better way of looking at this has to be restrictions, and what impact they had on the spread of the virus, as opposed to the costs on personal freedoms.

    So restrictions on nightclubs probably made a lot of sense, as did a requirement to wear masks in rush hour on public transport.

    While preventing people from meeting others, even outside!, was a massive invasion of personal liberty with very little evidence it will have had any meaningful impact on the spread of the virus.

    It was grotesque. It was quite Pol Pot esque, when you think about it. A surreal perversion of normal life for some infantile creed and no obvious purpose
    It's funny, because I was reading an article by a man called Sean Thomas today, about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In it he described people smashing the heads of children against a tree, having been instructed to laugh out loud while swinging the infants.

    And you know what, I thought "wow, that was just like lockdown."

    I seem to remember SeanT reporting that he'd seen someone coughing in the fruit isle of his local supermarket and wanting to 'bury a knife in his head'. So perhaps for him it was.
    I've just gone to one of my favourite pubs in Alresford and discovered their specials board is now entirely "plant based" - and venison as the meat option on the main menu, which is the Wokies choice of meat - and now I want to bury a knife in the new owner/chefs head, so I know what that feels like.

    Might be why they only have three covers at 1pm on a Saturday.
    Venison is woke? Why? Isn't that the only mammal meat you can get that has to be hunted not farmed?
    Venison is awesome - a little tricky to cook well… now I’m heading to the butchers.
  • Options
    GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,079

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    "Lockdown" is a terrible word and covers a very wide variety of sins.

    A much better way of looking at this has to be restrictions, and what impact they had on the spread of the virus, as opposed to the costs on personal freedoms.

    So restrictions on nightclubs probably made a lot of sense, as did a requirement to wear masks in rush hour on public transport.

    While preventing people from meeting others, even outside!, was a massive invasion of personal liberty with very little evidence it will have had any meaningful impact on the spread of the virus.

    It was grotesque. It was quite Pol Pot esque, when you think about it. A surreal perversion of normal life for some infantile creed and no obvious purpose
    It's funny, because I was reading an article by a man called Sean Thomas today, about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In it he described people smashing the heads of children against a tree, having been instructed to laugh out loud while swinging the infants.

    And you know what, I thought "wow, that was just like lockdown."

    I seem to remember SeanT reporting that he'd seen someone coughing in the fruit isle of his local supermarket and wanting to 'bury a knife in his head'. So perhaps for him it was.
    I've just gone to one of my favourite pubs in Alresford and discovered their specials board is now entirely "plant based" - and venison as the meat option on the main menu, which is the Wokies choice of meat - and now I want to bury a knife in the new owner/chefs head, so I know what that feels like.

    Might be why they only have three covers at 1pm on a Saturday.
    Venison is woke? Why? Isn't that the only mammal meat you can get that has to be hunted not farmed?
    It's the sort of meat Greens and Lefties offer as an "alternative" to their veganism, and isn't very popular.

    Trust me, it's Woke.
    This sounds quite deranged to be honest.
  • Options
    Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 25,458
    MaxPB said:

    On a serious point I presume it is okay for Russians to come on this site and give us their opinions? Is it just bot farms that are blacklisted?

    I don't think in the second world war we would have allowed Germans to come and speak in favour of Nazis and exterminating Jews and minorities. This is no different.
    It is quite different actually.
  • Options
    I am going for a woke run
  • Options
    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 44,426
    WillG said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    I think in hindsight we should have locked the over 60s and very vulnerable indoors but everyone else should have been free. I naively assumed we’d get some kind of gratitude or sympathy for what we did but no we just get fucked over again and again. Sick of it.

    I think you let your anger colour a rational appreciation of reality. Many, many people under 60 died, and many more would have if we had simply locked up the over 60s. Besides, you’d never pass such a law. What next? Only under 30s to wear tight jeans?
    At the time you were one of the most strident in calling for lockdowns. Endless posts of ‘lockdown now’. It was never just about protecting the elderly. Prior to vaccination covid could take people of any age, albeit skewed to the older population, just like flu. The lockdowns were to prevent stress on the healthcare system so that deaths from other causes didn’t happen. You think the ambulance waits were bad recently? Wonder what would have happened if we had not locked down in March 2020.

    There is one awful counterfactual out there. A do nothing approach, have a huge wave, infect most and then recover. No idea how many would have died but plausibly over a million when secondary death is included due to the lack of healthcare. But we would have been through it quicker. It’s just that few societies would accept that risk.
    I think the anti-lockdown crowd also forget that the vast majority of people were already locking themselves down in advance of the official rules. Shops were closing, pubs and cafes were empty. This matters because the economy was grinding to a halt but without it being official the systems to provide support to our economy, to all the businesses that were going to go bust, would have been a lot more difficult if not impossible.

    So the end result would have been more people dying but less support for people to survive. Far more people would have been forced to put themselves in danger for purely economic reasons and the country would have come out of it in a far worse place.
    That's people's personal choice at that point which is what should have been after lockdown 1. You're supposed to be a liberal.
    I am a liberal not an anarchist. What you propose would have resulted in anarchy. Far more economic damage to the country and far more deaths.

    Saying people have a choice when that choice is to catch covid or lose their jobs is really not very liberal at all.
    No it's not anarchy, it's allowing people to make the choice that's best for them, even at the time the risk factors from COVID for working age people were very low.
    It would have been anarchy when the hospitals could no longer cope and treat all those younger people with normal illnesses and injuries. Moreover it would not have helped the high street with most people boycotting pubs and restaurants and no government support in place.
    And yet countries which let people make the choice didn't have those issues. And wrt healthcare you deprioritise COVID cases among those who have the lowest chance of survival at least with the NHS given it is resource limited. It might sound harsh but ultimately the alternative choice has proved to be a disaster. The UK is stuffed, we've got no money left, the highest tax burden in a generation and no growth prospects as young people start to realise there's nothing for them here.
    UK growth prospects have been hammered by decades of relying just on financial services, ramping up the population with low skill workers and not building enough houses or infrastructure. And, even given all that, the lower living standards of young people are still far better than the standards my parents generation had growing up. Expecting many of them to die to fund better lifestyles is horrific.
    You forgot the real, hard work of management - investing in the right things to improve productivity. Both equipment and people. This takes years to show results, often, but is the basis of future growth.
  • Options

    I am going for a woke run

    A "They / Them" run instead of a "He / Him" one?
  • Options
    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 44,426

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    "Lockdown" is a terrible word and covers a very wide variety of sins.

    A much better way of looking at this has to be restrictions, and what impact they had on the spread of the virus, as opposed to the costs on personal freedoms.

    So restrictions on nightclubs probably made a lot of sense, as did a requirement to wear masks in rush hour on public transport.

    While preventing people from meeting others, even outside!, was a massive invasion of personal liberty with very little evidence it will have had any meaningful impact on the spread of the virus.

    It was grotesque. It was quite Pol Pot esque, when you think about it. A surreal perversion of normal life for some infantile creed and no obvious purpose
    It's funny, because I was reading an article by a man called Sean Thomas today, about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In it he described people smashing the heads of children against a tree, having been instructed to laugh out loud while swinging the infants.

    And you know what, I thought "wow, that was just like lockdown."

    I seem to remember SeanT reporting that he'd seen someone coughing in the fruit isle of his local supermarket and wanting to 'bury a knife in his head'. So perhaps for him it was.
    I've just gone to one of my favourite pubs in Alresford and discovered their specials board is now entirely "plant based" - and venison as the meat option on the main menu, which is the Wokies choice of meat - and now I want to bury a knife in the new owner/chefs head, so I know what that feels like.

    Might be why they only have three covers at 1pm on a Saturday.
    Venison is woke? Why? Isn't that the only mammal meat you can get that has to be hunted not farmed?
    It's the sort of meat Greens and Lefties offer as an "alternative" to their veganism, and isn't very popular.

    Trust me, it's Woke.
    This sounds quite deranged to be honest.
    I am trying to imagine explaining that venison is woke to the kind of people I know who hunt deer.

    It involves guns, very sharp knifes and actually knowing a great deal about the physical world….
  • Options
    Sean_FSean_F Posts: 35,850

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    "Lockdown" is a terrible word and covers a very wide variety of sins.

    A much better way of looking at this has to be restrictions, and what impact they had on the spread of the virus, as opposed to the costs on personal freedoms.

    So restrictions on nightclubs probably made a lot of sense, as did a requirement to wear masks in rush hour on public transport.

    While preventing people from meeting others, even outside!, was a massive invasion of personal liberty with very little evidence it will have had any meaningful impact on the spread of the virus.

    It was grotesque. It was quite Pol Pot esque, when you think about it. A surreal perversion of normal life for some infantile creed and no obvious purpose
    It's funny, because I was reading an article by a man called Sean Thomas today, about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In it he described people smashing the heads of children against a tree, having been instructed to laugh out loud while swinging the infants.

    And you know what, I thought "wow, that was just like lockdown."

    I seem to remember SeanT reporting that he'd seen someone coughing in the fruit isle of his local supermarket and wanting to 'bury a knife in his head'. So perhaps for him it was.
    I've just gone to one of my favourite pubs in Alresford and discovered their specials board is now entirely "plant based" - and venison as the meat option on the main menu, which is the Wokies choice of meat - and now I want to bury a knife in the new owner/chefs head, so I know what that feels like.

    Might be why they only have three covers at 1pm on a Saturday.
    I love venison seasoned with garlic and paprika and stewed in red wine.

    I can perfectly enjoy good vegetarian foods (eg wild mushroom risotto, spaghetti with alio and olio, penne with spinach and pine nuts.

    What I loathe is “meat” made out of vegetables. It’s like eating orc excrement.
  • Options
    rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 54,001

    MaxPB said:

    On a serious point I presume it is okay for Russians to come on this site and give us their opinions? Is it just bot farms that are blacklisted?

    I don't think in the second world war we would have allowed Germans to come and speak in favour of Nazis and exterminating Jews and minorities. This is no different.
    It is quite different actually.
    You're right:

    The Nazis didn't engage in poisoning people in the UK who'd fled their regime.
  • Options
    Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,358

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    "Lockdown" is a terrible word and covers a very wide variety of sins.

    A much better way of looking at this has to be restrictions, and what impact they had on the spread of the virus, as opposed to the costs on personal freedoms.

    So restrictions on nightclubs probably made a lot of sense, as did a requirement to wear masks in rush hour on public transport.

    While preventing people from meeting others, even outside!, was a massive invasion of personal liberty with very little evidence it will have had any meaningful impact on the spread of the virus.

    It was grotesque. It was quite Pol Pot esque, when you think about it. A surreal perversion of normal life for some infantile creed and no obvious purpose
    It's funny, because I was reading an article by a man called Sean Thomas today, about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In it he described people smashing the heads of children against a tree, having been instructed to laugh out loud while swinging the infants.

    And you know what, I thought "wow, that was just like lockdown."

    I seem to remember SeanT reporting that he'd seen someone coughing in the fruit isle of his local supermarket and wanting to 'bury a knife in his head'. So perhaps for him it was.
    I've just gone to one of my favourite pubs in Alresford and discovered their specials board is now entirely "plant based" - and venison as the meat option on the main menu, which is the Wokies choice of meat - and now I want to bury a knife in the new owner/chefs head, so I know what that feels like.

    Might be why they only have three covers at 1pm on a Saturday.
    Venison is woke? Why? Isn't that the only mammal meat you can get that has to be hunted not farmed?
    I studied Environmental Science for some time. Venison is one of the best meats we could eat in the UK, nothing woke about it.
    It's Woke. You're a child

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    "Lockdown" is a terrible word and covers a very wide variety of sins.

    A much better way of looking at this has to be restrictions, and what impact they had on the spread of the virus, as opposed to the costs on personal freedoms.

    So restrictions on nightclubs probably made a lot of sense, as did a requirement to wear masks in rush hour on public transport.

    While preventing people from meeting others, even outside!, was a massive invasion of personal liberty with very little evidence it will have had any meaningful impact on the spread of the virus.

    It was grotesque. It was quite Pol Pot esque, when you think about it. A surreal perversion of normal life for some infantile creed and no obvious purpose
    It's funny, because I was reading an article by a man called Sean Thomas today, about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In it he described people smashing the heads of children against a tree, having been instructed to laugh out loud while swinging the infants.

    And you know what, I thought "wow, that was just like lockdown."

    I seem to remember SeanT reporting that he'd seen someone coughing in the fruit isle of his local supermarket and wanting to 'bury a knife in his head'. So perhaps for him it was.
    I've just gone to one of my favourite pubs in Alresford and discovered their specials board is now entirely "plant based" - and venison as the meat option on the main menu, which is the Wokies choice of meat - and now I want to bury a knife in the new owner/chefs head, so I know what that feels like.

    Might be why they only have three covers at 1pm on a Saturday.
    Venison is woke? Why? Isn't that the only mammal meat you can get that has to be hunted not farmed?
    It's the sort of meat Greens and Lefties offer as an "alternative" to their veganism, and isn't very popular.

    Trust me, it's Woke.
    This sounds quite deranged to be honest.
    I used to like vension.

    It's been destroyed by the brand. Idiotic fellow travellers, like you.
  • Options
    SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,898
    Way off topic I know, but I’m at the races at Meydan today. Does anyone have any tips for the remaining races, as I seem to be picking the last horse in each race so far!
  • Options
    ohnotnowohnotnow Posts: 2,938

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    "Lockdown" is a terrible word and covers a very wide variety of sins.

    A much better way of looking at this has to be restrictions, and what impact they had on the spread of the virus, as opposed to the costs on personal freedoms.

    So restrictions on nightclubs probably made a lot of sense, as did a requirement to wear masks in rush hour on public transport.

    While preventing people from meeting others, even outside!, was a massive invasion of personal liberty with very little evidence it will have had any meaningful impact on the spread of the virus.

    It was grotesque. It was quite Pol Pot esque, when you think about it. A surreal perversion of normal life for some infantile creed and no obvious purpose
    It's funny, because I was reading an article by a man called Sean Thomas today, about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In it he described people smashing the heads of children against a tree, having been instructed to laugh out loud while swinging the infants.

    And you know what, I thought "wow, that was just like lockdown."

    I seem to remember SeanT reporting that he'd seen someone coughing in the fruit isle of his local supermarket and wanting to 'bury a knife in his head'. So perhaps for him it was.
    I've just gone to one of my favourite pubs in Alresford and discovered their specials board is now entirely "plant based" - and venison as the meat option on the main menu, which is the Wokies choice of meat - and now I want to bury a knife in the new owner/chefs head, so I know what that feels like.

    Might be why they only have three covers at 1pm on a Saturday.
    Venison is woke? Why? Isn't that the only mammal meat you can get that has to be hunted not farmed?
    Venison is awesome - a little tricky to cook well… now I’m heading to the butchers.
    And helps keep the number of deer down, which helps reforestation efforts and stops the deers themselves slowly dying of starvation over winter.
  • Options
    Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,358
    Sean_F said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    "Lockdown" is a terrible word and covers a very wide variety of sins.

    A much better way of looking at this has to be restrictions, and what impact they had on the spread of the virus, as opposed to the costs on personal freedoms.

    So restrictions on nightclubs probably made a lot of sense, as did a requirement to wear masks in rush hour on public transport.

    While preventing people from meeting others, even outside!, was a massive invasion of personal liberty with very little evidence it will have had any meaningful impact on the spread of the virus.

    It was grotesque. It was quite Pol Pot esque, when you think about it. A surreal perversion of normal life for some infantile creed and no obvious purpose
    It's funny, because I was reading an article by a man called Sean Thomas today, about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In it he described people smashing the heads of children against a tree, having been instructed to laugh out loud while swinging the infants.

    And you know what, I thought "wow, that was just like lockdown."

    I seem to remember SeanT reporting that he'd seen someone coughing in the fruit isle of his local supermarket and wanting to 'bury a knife in his head'. So perhaps for him it was.
    I've just gone to one of my favourite pubs in Alresford and discovered their specials board is now entirely "plant based" - and venison as the meat option on the main menu, which is the Wokies choice of meat - and now I want to bury a knife in the new owner/chefs head, so I know what that feels like.

    Might be why they only have three covers at 1pm on a Saturday.
    I love venison seasoned with garlic and paprika and stewed in red wine.

    I can perfectly enjoy good vegetarian foods (eg wild mushroom risotto, spaghetti with alio and olio, penne with spinach and pine nuts.

    What I loathe is “meat” made out of vegetables. It’s like eating orc excrement.
    What I hate is the choice being inflicted on me, still more a contempt for the sort of people behind it who do it.
  • Options
    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 44,426
    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    On a serious point I presume it is okay for Russians to come on this site and give us their opinions? Is it just bot farms that are blacklisted?

    I don't think in the second world war we would have allowed Germans to come and speak in favour of Nazis and exterminating Jews and minorities. This is no different.
    It is quite different actually.
    You're right:

    The Nazis didn't engage in poisoning people in the UK who'd fled their regime.
    To be fair, that was probably only because all the German agents in the U.K. were known to the security services, and were either turned or hung.

    I’m quite sure that Hitler & Co. would have been keen on a bit more murder.

    It remains a question whether the head of German Intelligence was actually a British agent.
  • Options
    Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,358

    I am going for a woke run

    Good. The less of your childish shitposting on here, the better.

    I

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    "Lockdown" is a terrible word and covers a very wide variety of sins.

    A much better way of looking at this has to be restrictions, and what impact they had on the spread of the virus, as opposed to the costs on personal freedoms.

    So restrictions on nightclubs probably made a lot of sense, as did a requirement to wear masks in rush hour on public transport.

    While preventing people from meeting others, even outside!, was a massive invasion of personal liberty with very little evidence it will have had any meaningful impact on the spread of the virus.

    It was grotesque. It was quite Pol Pot esque, when you think about it. A surreal perversion of normal life for some infantile creed and no obvious purpose
    It's funny, because I was reading an article by a man called Sean Thomas today, about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In it he described people smashing the heads of children against a tree, having been instructed to laugh out loud while swinging the infants.

    And you know what, I thought "wow, that was just like lockdown."

    I seem to remember SeanT reporting that he'd seen someone coughing in the fruit isle of his local supermarket and wanting to 'bury a knife in his head'. So perhaps for him it was.
    I've just gone to one of my favourite pubs in Alresford and discovered their specials board is now entirely "plant based" - and venison as the meat option on the main menu, which is the Wokies choice of meat - and now I want to bury a knife in the new owner/chefs head, so I know what that feels like.

    Might be why they only have three covers at 1pm on a Saturday.
    Venison is woke? Why? Isn't that the only mammal meat you can get that has to be hunted not farmed?
    It's the sort of meat Greens and Lefties offer as an "alternative" to their veganism, and isn't very popular.

    Trust me, it's Woke.
    This sounds quite deranged to be honest.
    I am trying to imagine explaining that venison is woke to the kind of people I know who hunt deer.

    It involves guns, very sharp knifes and actually knowing a great deal about the physical world….
    It's Woke because it's about people who are Woke trying to inflict their Woke view on others.

    You've got to read the tealeaves to understand these people.
  • Options
    GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,079
    @Casino_Royale why would you not eat something just because some other people (who you don't like) also like it?
  • Options
    noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 20,761

    I am going for a woke run

    I am drinking a diet drink so lefty liberal it even rhymes with woke.
  • Options
    TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 40,115
    edited March 2023
    ohnotnow said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    "Lockdown" is a terrible word and covers a very wide variety of sins.

    A much better way of looking at this has to be restrictions, and what impact they had on the spread of the virus, as opposed to the costs on personal freedoms.

    So restrictions on nightclubs probably made a lot of sense, as did a requirement to wear masks in rush hour on public transport.

    While preventing people from meeting others, even outside!, was a massive invasion of personal liberty with very little evidence it will have had any meaningful impact on the spread of the virus.

    It was grotesque. It was quite Pol Pot esque, when you think about it. A surreal perversion of normal life for some infantile creed and no obvious purpose
    It's funny, because I was reading an article by a man called Sean Thomas today, about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In it he described people smashing the heads of children against a tree, having been instructed to laugh out loud while swinging the infants.

    And you know what, I thought "wow, that was just like lockdown."

    I seem to remember SeanT reporting that he'd seen someone coughing in the fruit isle of his local supermarket and wanting to 'bury a knife in his head'. So perhaps for him it was.
    I've just gone to one of my favourite pubs in Alresford and discovered their specials board is now entirely "plant based" - and venison as the meat option on the main menu, which is the Wokies choice of meat - and now I want to bury a knife in the new owner/chefs head, so I know what that feels like.

    Might be why they only have three covers at 1pm on a Saturday.
    Venison is woke? Why? Isn't that the only mammal meat you can get that has to be hunted not farmed?
    Venison is awesome - a little tricky to cook well… now I’m heading to the butchers.
    And helps keep the number of deer down, which helps reforestation efforts and stops the deers themselves slowly dying of starvation over winter.
    Concern for the environment and animal welfare, definitely Woke!
  • Options

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    "Lockdown" is a terrible word and covers a very wide variety of sins.

    A much better way of looking at this has to be restrictions, and what impact they had on the spread of the virus, as opposed to the costs on personal freedoms.

    So restrictions on nightclubs probably made a lot of sense, as did a requirement to wear masks in rush hour on public transport.

    While preventing people from meeting others, even outside!, was a massive invasion of personal liberty with very little evidence it will have had any meaningful impact on the spread of the virus.

    It was grotesque. It was quite Pol Pot esque, when you think about it. A surreal perversion of normal life for some infantile creed and no obvious purpose
    It's funny, because I was reading an article by a man called Sean Thomas today, about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In it he described people smashing the heads of children against a tree, having been instructed to laugh out loud while swinging the infants.

    And you know what, I thought "wow, that was just like lockdown."

    I seem to remember SeanT reporting that he'd seen someone coughing in the fruit isle of his local supermarket and wanting to 'bury a knife in his head'. So perhaps for him it was.
    I've just gone to one of my favourite pubs in Alresford and discovered their specials board is now entirely "plant based" - and venison as the meat option on the main menu, which is the Wokies choice of meat - and now I want to bury a knife in the new owner/chefs head, so I know what that feels like.

    Might be why they only have three covers at 1pm on a Saturday.
    Venison is woke? Why? Isn't that the only mammal meat you can get that has to be hunted not farmed?
    Venison is awesome - a little tricky to cook well… now I’m heading to the butchers.
    I like venison but the price of it puts me off because venison is a little dear.
  • Options
    Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,358

    I am going for a woke run

    Fuck off then, the less the site has of you and your shitposting the better.

    You contemptible little shit.
  • Options
    OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 15,121

    I am going for a woke run

    Good. The less of your childish shitposting on here, the better.

    I

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    "Lockdown" is a terrible word and covers a very wide variety of sins.

    A much better way of looking at this has to be restrictions, and what impact they had on the spread of the virus, as opposed to the costs on personal freedoms.

    So restrictions on nightclubs probably made a lot of sense, as did a requirement to wear masks in rush hour on public transport.

    While preventing people from meeting others, even outside!, was a massive invasion of personal liberty with very little evidence it will have had any meaningful impact on the spread of the virus.

    It was grotesque. It was quite Pol Pot esque, when you think about it. A surreal perversion of normal life for some infantile creed and no obvious purpose
    It's funny, because I was reading an article by a man called Sean Thomas today, about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In it he described people smashing the heads of children against a tree, having been instructed to laugh out loud while swinging the infants.

    And you know what, I thought "wow, that was just like lockdown."

    I seem to remember SeanT reporting that he'd seen someone coughing in the fruit isle of his local supermarket and wanting to 'bury a knife in his head'. So perhaps for him it was.
    I've just gone to one of my favourite pubs in Alresford and discovered their specials board is now entirely "plant based" - and venison as the meat option on the main menu, which is the Wokies choice of meat - and now I want to bury a knife in the new owner/chefs head, so I know what that feels like.

    Might be why they only have three covers at 1pm on a Saturday.
    Venison is woke? Why? Isn't that the only mammal meat you can get that has to be hunted not farmed?
    It's the sort of meat Greens and Lefties offer as an "alternative" to their veganism, and isn't very popular.

    Trust me, it's Woke.
    This sounds quite deranged to be honest.
    I am trying to imagine explaining that venison is woke to the kind of people I know who hunt deer.

    It involves guns, very sharp knifes and actually knowing a great deal about the physical world….
    It's Woke because it's about people who are Woke trying to inflict their Woke view on others.

    You've got to read the tealeaves to understand these people.
    Presumably these would be herbal tea leaves?
  • Options
    Sean_FSean_F Posts: 35,850

    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    On a serious point I presume it is okay for Russians to come on this site and give us their opinions? Is it just bot farms that are blacklisted?

    I don't think in the second world war we would have allowed Germans to come and speak in favour of Nazis and exterminating Jews and minorities. This is no different.
    It is quite different actually.
    You're right:

    The Nazis didn't engage in poisoning people in the UK who'd fled their regime.
    To be fair, that was probably only because all the German agents in the U.K. were known to the security services, and were either turned or hung.

    I’m quite sure that Hitler & Co. would have been keen on a bit more murder.

    It remains a question whether the head of German Intelligence was actually a British agent.
    German intelligence was utterly inept. The Russians have always been much better at it.
  • Options
    noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 20,761

    I am going for a woke run

    Good. The less of your childish shitposting on here, the better.

    I

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    "Lockdown" is a terrible word and covers a very wide variety of sins.

    A much better way of looking at this has to be restrictions, and what impact they had on the spread of the virus, as opposed to the costs on personal freedoms.

    So restrictions on nightclubs probably made a lot of sense, as did a requirement to wear masks in rush hour on public transport.

    While preventing people from meeting others, even outside!, was a massive invasion of personal liberty with very little evidence it will have had any meaningful impact on the spread of the virus.

    It was grotesque. It was quite Pol Pot esque, when you think about it. A surreal perversion of normal life for some infantile creed and no obvious purpose
    It's funny, because I was reading an article by a man called Sean Thomas today, about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In it he described people smashing the heads of children against a tree, having been instructed to laugh out loud while swinging the infants.

    And you know what, I thought "wow, that was just like lockdown."

    I seem to remember SeanT reporting that he'd seen someone coughing in the fruit isle of his local supermarket and wanting to 'bury a knife in his head'. So perhaps for him it was.
    I've just gone to one of my favourite pubs in Alresford and discovered their specials board is now entirely "plant based" - and venison as the meat option on the main menu, which is the Wokies choice of meat - and now I want to bury a knife in the new owner/chefs head, so I know what that feels like.

    Might be why they only have three covers at 1pm on a Saturday.
    Venison is woke? Why? Isn't that the only mammal meat you can get that has to be hunted not farmed?
    It's the sort of meat Greens and Lefties offer as an "alternative" to their veganism, and isn't very popular.

    Trust me, it's Woke.
    This sounds quite deranged to be honest.
    I am trying to imagine explaining that venison is woke to the kind of people I know who hunt deer.

    It involves guns, very sharp knifes and actually knowing a great deal about the physical world….
    It's Woke because it's about people who are Woke trying to inflict their Woke view on others.

    You've got to read the tealeaves to understand these people.
    Presumably these would be herbal tea leaves?
    Organic perhaps?
  • Options
    ydoethurydoethur Posts: 67,249
    How could anyone who is not a vegetarian not like venison? It is the king of meats.

    OK, I can't afford to eat it every week but you haven't lived until you've eaten venison lasagne.
  • Options
    ohnotnowohnotnow Posts: 2,938

    ohnotnow said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    "Lockdown" is a terrible word and covers a very wide variety of sins.

    A much better way of looking at this has to be restrictions, and what impact they had on the spread of the virus, as opposed to the costs on personal freedoms.

    So restrictions on nightclubs probably made a lot of sense, as did a requirement to wear masks in rush hour on public transport.

    While preventing people from meeting others, even outside!, was a massive invasion of personal liberty with very little evidence it will have had any meaningful impact on the spread of the virus.

    It was grotesque. It was quite Pol Pot esque, when you think about it. A surreal perversion of normal life for some infantile creed and no obvious purpose
    It's funny, because I was reading an article by a man called Sean Thomas today, about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In it he described people smashing the heads of children against a tree, having been instructed to laugh out loud while swinging the infants.

    And you know what, I thought "wow, that was just like lockdown."

    I seem to remember SeanT reporting that he'd seen someone coughing in the fruit isle of his local supermarket and wanting to 'bury a knife in his head'. So perhaps for him it was.
    I've just gone to one of my favourite pubs in Alresford and discovered their specials board is now entirely "plant based" - and venison as the meat option on the main menu, which is the Wokies choice of meat - and now I want to bury a knife in the new owner/chefs head, so I know what that feels like.

    Might be why they only have three covers at 1pm on a Saturday.
    Venison is woke? Why? Isn't that the only mammal meat you can get that has to be hunted not farmed?
    Venison is awesome - a little tricky to cook well… now I’m heading to the butchers.
    And helps keep the number of deer down, which helps reforestation efforts and stops the deers themselves slowly dying of starvation over winter.
    Concern for the environment and animal welfare, definitely Woke!
    Damn - they've got to me despite being on my guard!
  • Options
    SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,898

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    "Lockdown" is a terrible word and covers a very wide variety of sins.

    A much better way of looking at this has to be restrictions, and what impact they had on the spread of the virus, as opposed to the costs on personal freedoms.

    So restrictions on nightclubs probably made a lot of sense, as did a requirement to wear masks in rush hour on public transport.

    While preventing people from meeting others, even outside!, was a massive invasion of personal liberty with very little evidence it will have had any meaningful impact on the spread of the virus.

    It was grotesque. It was quite Pol Pot esque, when you think about it. A surreal perversion of normal life for some infantile creed and no obvious purpose
    It's funny, because I was reading an article by a man called Sean Thomas today, about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In it he described people smashing the heads of children against a tree, having been instructed to laugh out loud while swinging the infants.

    And you know what, I thought "wow, that was just like lockdown."

    I seem to remember SeanT reporting that he'd seen someone coughing in the fruit isle of his local supermarket and wanting to 'bury a knife in his head'. So perhaps for him it was.
    I've just gone to one of my favourite pubs in Alresford and discovered their specials board is now entirely "plant based" - and venison as the meat option on the main menu, which is the Wokies choice of meat - and now I want to bury a knife in the new owner/chefs head, so I know what that feels like.

    Might be why they only have three covers at 1pm on a Saturday.
    Venison is woke? Why? Isn't that the only mammal meat you can get that has to be hunted not farmed?
    Venison is awesome - a little tricky to cook well… now I’m heading to the butchers.
    I like venison but the price of it puts me off because venison is a little dear.
    I thought it was a little deer.
  • Options
    rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 54,001

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    "Lockdown" is a terrible word and covers a very wide variety of sins.

    A much better way of looking at this has to be restrictions, and what impact they had on the spread of the virus, as opposed to the costs on personal freedoms.

    So restrictions on nightclubs probably made a lot of sense, as did a requirement to wear masks in rush hour on public transport.

    While preventing people from meeting others, even outside!, was a massive invasion of personal liberty with very little evidence it will have had any meaningful impact on the spread of the virus.

    It was grotesque. It was quite Pol Pot esque, when you think about it. A surreal perversion of normal life for some infantile creed and no obvious purpose
    It's funny, because I was reading an article by a man called Sean Thomas today, about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In it he described people smashing the heads of children against a tree, having been instructed to laugh out loud while swinging the infants.

    And you know what, I thought "wow, that was just like lockdown."

    I seem to remember SeanT reporting that he'd seen someone coughing in the fruit isle of his local supermarket and wanting to 'bury a knife in his head'. So perhaps for him it was.
    I've just gone to one of my favourite pubs in Alresford and discovered their specials board is now entirely "plant based" - and venison as the meat option on the main menu, which is the Wokies choice of meat - and now I want to bury a knife in the new owner/chefs head, so I know what that feels like.

    Might be why they only have three covers at 1pm on a Saturday.
    Venison is woke? Why? Isn't that the only mammal meat you can get that has to be hunted not farmed?
    I studied Environmental Science for some time. Venison is one of the best meats we could eat in the UK, nothing woke about it.
    It's Woke. You're a child

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    "Lockdown" is a terrible word and covers a very wide variety of sins.

    A much better way of looking at this has to be restrictions, and what impact they had on the spread of the virus, as opposed to the costs on personal freedoms.

    So restrictions on nightclubs probably made a lot of sense, as did a requirement to wear masks in rush hour on public transport.

    While preventing people from meeting others, even outside!, was a massive invasion of personal liberty with very little evidence it will have had any meaningful impact on the spread of the virus.

    It was grotesque. It was quite Pol Pot esque, when you think about it. A surreal perversion of normal life for some infantile creed and no obvious purpose
    It's funny, because I was reading an article by a man called Sean Thomas today, about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In it he described people smashing the heads of children against a tree, having been instructed to laugh out loud while swinging the infants.

    And you know what, I thought "wow, that was just like lockdown."

    I seem to remember SeanT reporting that he'd seen someone coughing in the fruit isle of his local supermarket and wanting to 'bury a knife in his head'. So perhaps for him it was.
    I've just gone to one of my favourite pubs in Alresford and discovered their specials board is now entirely "plant based" - and venison as the meat option on the main menu, which is the Wokies choice of meat - and now I want to bury a knife in the new owner/chefs head, so I know what that feels like.

    Might be why they only have three covers at 1pm on a Saturday.
    Venison is woke? Why? Isn't that the only mammal meat you can get that has to be hunted not farmed?
    It's the sort of meat Greens and Lefties offer as an "alternative" to their veganism, and isn't very popular.

    Trust me, it's Woke.
    This sounds quite deranged to be honest.
    I used to like vension.

    It's been destroyed by the brand. Idiotic fellow travellers, like you.
    It's food.

    It's taste hasn't changed. It's calorie count hasn't changed. It's texture and the way it's cooked hasn't changed.

    Food doesn't have opinions.

    To quote MJ Hibbett in The Lesson of the Smiths:

    "Just because a bunch of wankers like it, doesn't mean that it's shit"
  • Options
    Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,358

    @Casino_Royale why would you not eat something just because some other people (who you don't like) also like it?

    Because these people are trying to dictate my choices and push their own world view on me.

    Don't try and deny it.
  • Options
    Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,358
    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    "Lockdown" is a terrible word and covers a very wide variety of sins.

    A much better way of looking at this has to be restrictions, and what impact they had on the spread of the virus, as opposed to the costs on personal freedoms.

    So restrictions on nightclubs probably made a lot of sense, as did a requirement to wear masks in rush hour on public transport.

    While preventing people from meeting others, even outside!, was a massive invasion of personal liberty with very little evidence it will have had any meaningful impact on the spread of the virus.

    It was grotesque. It was quite Pol Pot esque, when you think about it. A surreal perversion of normal life for some infantile creed and no obvious purpose
    It's funny, because I was reading an article by a man called Sean Thomas today, about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In it he described people smashing the heads of children against a tree, having been instructed to laugh out loud while swinging the infants.

    And you know what, I thought "wow, that was just like lockdown."

    I seem to remember SeanT reporting that he'd seen someone coughing in the fruit isle of his local supermarket and wanting to 'bury a knife in his head'. So perhaps for him it was.
    I've just gone to one of my favourite pubs in Alresford and discovered their specials board is now entirely "plant based" - and venison as the meat option on the main menu, which is the Wokies choice of meat - and now I want to bury a knife in the new owner/chefs head, so I know what that feels like.

    Might be why they only have three covers at 1pm on a Saturday.
    Venison is woke? Why? Isn't that the only mammal meat you can get that has to be hunted not farmed?
    I studied Environmental Science for some time. Venison is one of the best meats we could eat in the UK, nothing woke about it.
    It's Woke. You're a child

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    "Lockdown" is a terrible word and covers a very wide variety of sins.

    A much better way of looking at this has to be restrictions, and what impact they had on the spread of the virus, as opposed to the costs on personal freedoms.

    So restrictions on nightclubs probably made a lot of sense, as did a requirement to wear masks in rush hour on public transport.

    While preventing people from meeting others, even outside!, was a massive invasion of personal liberty with very little evidence it will have had any meaningful impact on the spread of the virus.

    It was grotesque. It was quite Pol Pot esque, when you think about it. A surreal perversion of normal life for some infantile creed and no obvious purpose
    It's funny, because I was reading an article by a man called Sean Thomas today, about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In it he described people smashing the heads of children against a tree, having been instructed to laugh out loud while swinging the infants.

    And you know what, I thought "wow, that was just like lockdown."

    I seem to remember SeanT reporting that he'd seen someone coughing in the fruit isle of his local supermarket and wanting to 'bury a knife in his head'. So perhaps for him it was.
    I've just gone to one of my favourite pubs in Alresford and discovered their specials board is now entirely "plant based" - and venison as the meat option on the main menu, which is the Wokies choice of meat - and now I want to bury a knife in the new owner/chefs head, so I know what that feels like.

    Might be why they only have three covers at 1pm on a Saturday.
    Venison is woke? Why? Isn't that the only mammal meat you can get that has to be hunted not farmed?
    It's the sort of meat Greens and Lefties offer as an "alternative" to their veganism, and isn't very popular.

    Trust me, it's Woke.
    This sounds quite deranged to be honest.
    I used to like vension.

    It's been destroyed by the brand. Idiotic fellow travellers, like you.
    It's food.

    It's taste hasn't changed. It's calorie count hasn't changed. It's texture and the way it's cooked hasn't changed.

    Food doesn't have opinions.

    To quote MJ Hibbett in The Lesson of the Smiths:

    "Just because a bunch of wankers like it, doesn't mean that it's shit"
    The people that select the food you are able to purchase have opinions, that's the problem. And the taste absolutely does change if your choice is restricted.

    And food is so much more than raw calories.

    So much more.
  • Options
    MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 44,426

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    "Lockdown" is a terrible word and covers a very wide variety of sins.

    A much better way of looking at this has to be restrictions, and what impact they had on the spread of the virus, as opposed to the costs on personal freedoms.

    So restrictions on nightclubs probably made a lot of sense, as did a requirement to wear masks in rush hour on public transport.

    While preventing people from meeting others, even outside!, was a massive invasion of personal liberty with very little evidence it will have had any meaningful impact on the spread of the virus.

    It was grotesque. It was quite Pol Pot esque, when you think about it. A surreal perversion of normal life for some infantile creed and no obvious purpose
    It's funny, because I was reading an article by a man called Sean Thomas today, about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In it he described people smashing the heads of children against a tree, having been instructed to laugh out loud while swinging the infants.

    And you know what, I thought "wow, that was just like lockdown."

    I seem to remember SeanT reporting that he'd seen someone coughing in the fruit isle of his local supermarket and wanting to 'bury a knife in his head'. So perhaps for him it was.
    I've just gone to one of my favourite pubs in Alresford and discovered their specials board is now entirely "plant based" - and venison as the meat option on the main menu, which is the Wokies choice of meat - and now I want to bury a knife in the new owner/chefs head, so I know what that feels like.

    Might be why they only have three covers at 1pm on a Saturday.
    Venison is woke? Why? Isn't that the only mammal meat you can get that has to be hunted not farmed?
    Venison is awesome - a little tricky to cook well… now I’m heading to the butchers.
    I like venison but the price of it puts me off because venison is a little dear.
    Bambi Chops are awesome.

    As a plus, a meat you can serve without religious offence. Excepting vegetarians, of course.
  • Options
    GardenwalkerGardenwalker Posts: 20,856
    I see @Casino_Royale is having one of his woke breakdowns again.
  • Options
    MattWMattW Posts: 18,567
    Quite 'interesting' interview with Isabel Oakeshott, revealing that she is actually a campaigner for truth who had an overriding ethical public interest imperative to break her NDA with Matt Hancock.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g01BV9g0rOw

    Call me Nagaina.
  • Options
    GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,079
    edited March 2023

    @Casino_Royale why would you not eat something just because some other people (who you don't like) also like it?

    Because these people are trying to dictate my choices and push their own world view on me.

    Don't try and deny it.
    I’m not a vegan and I don’t go to vegan/venison restaurants. I go to Wetherspoons.

    I honestly don’t see the problem.
  • Options
    CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,787
    Sandpit said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    "Lockdown" is a terrible word and covers a very wide variety of sins.

    A much better way of looking at this has to be restrictions, and what impact they had on the spread of the virus, as opposed to the costs on personal freedoms.

    So restrictions on nightclubs probably made a lot of sense, as did a requirement to wear masks in rush hour on public transport.

    While preventing people from meeting others, even outside!, was a massive invasion of personal liberty with very little evidence it will have had any meaningful impact on the spread of the virus.

    It was grotesque. It was quite Pol Pot esque, when you think about it. A surreal perversion of normal life for some infantile creed and no obvious purpose
    It's funny, because I was reading an article by a man called Sean Thomas today, about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In it he described people smashing the heads of children against a tree, having been instructed to laugh out loud while swinging the infants.

    And you know what, I thought "wow, that was just like lockdown."

    I seem to remember SeanT reporting that he'd seen someone coughing in the fruit isle of his local supermarket and wanting to 'bury a knife in his head'. So perhaps for him it was.
    I've just gone to one of my favourite pubs in Alresford and discovered their specials board is now entirely "plant based" - and venison as the meat option on the main menu, which is the Wokies choice of meat - and now I want to bury a knife in the new owner/chefs head, so I know what that feels like.

    Might be why they only have three covers at 1pm on a Saturday.
    Venison is woke? Why? Isn't that the only mammal meat you can get that has to be hunted not farmed?
    Venison is awesome - a little tricky to cook well… now I’m heading to the butchers.
    I like venison but the price of it puts me off because venison is a little dear.
    I thought it was a little deer.
    One can certainly roe the price, if it gets the old Mastercard in the red, I muntjac. Though CR is even sika than he was feeling over having to watch films which don't have trigger warnings for wokery at the beginning, so he never knows whjat to expect.
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    CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,787

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    "Lockdown" is a terrible word and covers a very wide variety of sins.

    A much better way of looking at this has to be restrictions, and what impact they had on the spread of the virus, as opposed to the costs on personal freedoms.

    So restrictions on nightclubs probably made a lot of sense, as did a requirement to wear masks in rush hour on public transport.

    While preventing people from meeting others, even outside!, was a massive invasion of personal liberty with very little evidence it will have had any meaningful impact on the spread of the virus.

    It was grotesque. It was quite Pol Pot esque, when you think about it. A surreal perversion of normal life for some infantile creed and no obvious purpose
    It's funny, because I was reading an article by a man called Sean Thomas today, about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In it he described people smashing the heads of children against a tree, having been instructed to laugh out loud while swinging the infants.

    And you know what, I thought "wow, that was just like lockdown."

    I seem to remember SeanT reporting that he'd seen someone coughing in the fruit isle of his local supermarket and wanting to 'bury a knife in his head'. So perhaps for him it was.
    I've just gone to one of my favourite pubs in Alresford and discovered their specials board is now entirely "plant based" - and venison as the meat option on the main menu, which is the Wokies choice of meat - and now I want to bury a knife in the new owner/chefs head, so I know what that feels like.

    Might be why they only have three covers at 1pm on a Saturday.
    Venison is woke? Why? Isn't that the only mammal meat you can get that has to be hunted not farmed?
    I studied Environmental Science for some time. Venison is one of the best meats we could eat in the UK, nothing woke about it.
    It's Woke. You're a child

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    "Lockdown" is a terrible word and covers a very wide variety of sins.

    A much better way of looking at this has to be restrictions, and what impact they had on the spread of the virus, as opposed to the costs on personal freedoms.

    So restrictions on nightclubs probably made a lot of sense, as did a requirement to wear masks in rush hour on public transport.

    While preventing people from meeting others, even outside!, was a massive invasion of personal liberty with very little evidence it will have had any meaningful impact on the spread of the virus.

    It was grotesque. It was quite Pol Pot esque, when you think about it. A surreal perversion of normal life for some infantile creed and no obvious purpose
    It's funny, because I was reading an article by a man called Sean Thomas today, about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In it he described people smashing the heads of children against a tree, having been instructed to laugh out loud while swinging the infants.

    And you know what, I thought "wow, that was just like lockdown."

    I seem to remember SeanT reporting that he'd seen someone coughing in the fruit isle of his local supermarket and wanting to 'bury a knife in his head'. So perhaps for him it was.
    I've just gone to one of my favourite pubs in Alresford and discovered their specials board is now entirely "plant based" - and venison as the meat option on the main menu, which is the Wokies choice of meat - and now I want to bury a knife in the new owner/chefs head, so I know what that feels like.

    Might be why they only have three covers at 1pm on a Saturday.
    Venison is woke? Why? Isn't that the only mammal meat you can get that has to be hunted not farmed?
    It's the sort of meat Greens and Lefties offer as an "alternative" to their veganism, and isn't very popular.

    Trust me, it's Woke.
    This sounds quite deranged to be honest.
    I used to like vension.

    It's been destroyed by the brand. Idiotic fellow travellers, like you.
    It's food.

    It's taste hasn't changed. It's calorie count hasn't changed. It's texture and the way it's cooked hasn't changed.

    Food doesn't have opinions.

    To quote MJ Hibbett in The Lesson of the Smiths:

    "Just because a bunch of wankers like it, doesn't mean that it's shit"
    The people that select the food you are able to purchase have opinions, that's the problem. And the taste absolutely does change if your choice is restricted.

    And food is so much more than raw calories.

    So much more.
    Food tastes different if you eat different food?
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    Only got a short effort in today, still building it up slowly and trying to mitigate these shin splints as best I can. Still hope I can get a proper 5K in by the end of March, fingers crossed.
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    MattWMattW Posts: 18,567

    Spot on comments from @Casino_Royale and @Leon earlier - too many nations thinking they can demand something of us because we are too lacking in balls to tell them to fuck off.

    For me, the epitome of that pussy attitude is George Osborne - a man who is quite willing to sell out any interest as long as it benefits himself. His attitude over the Elgin Marbles is only the latest example, with probably his most egregious act being the whole Graphene issue and the Chinese. Truly a man who will quite happily get on his knees and suck anything as long as money is involved.

    Does the forked tongue help in those circs?
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    I see @Casino_Royale is having one of his woke breakdowns again.

    I hope everything is okay with him, we will all send him our best wishes I am sure.
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